These lecture notes present some basic notions and results on Automata Theory,
Formal Languages Theory, Computability Theory, and Parsing Theory. I prepared
these notes for a course on Automata, Languages, and Translators which I am
teaching at the University of Roma Tor Vergata. More material on these topics and
on parsing techniques for context-free languages can be found in standard textbooks
such as [1, 8, 9]. The reader is encouraged to look at those books.
A theorem denoted by the triple k.m.n is in Chapter k and Section m, and within
that section it is identified by the number n. Analogous numbering system is used
for algorithms, corollaries, definitions, examples, exercises, figures, and remarks. We
use ‘iff’ to mean ‘if and only if’.
Many thanks to my colleagues of the Department of Informatics, Systems, and
Production of the University of Roma Tor Vergata. I am also grateful to my stu-
dents and co-workers and, in particular, to Lorenzo Clemente, Corrado Di Pietro,
Fulvio Forni, Fabio Lecca, Maurizio Proietti, and Valerio Senni for their help and
encouragement.
Finally, I am grateful to Francesca Di Benedetto, Alessandro Colombo, Donato
Corvaglia, Gioacchino Onorati, and Leonardo Rinaldi of the Aracne Publishing Com-
pany for their kind cooperation