Regulated Grammars and Their Transformations

By regulated grammars, this book refers to any context-free grammars extended by additional mathematical mechanisms that prescribe the use of rules during the generation of their languages. The book pays a special attention to these six crucially important regulated grammars---regular-controlled grammars, matrix grammars, programmed grammars, random context grammars, scattered context grammars, and state grammars. More specifically, it primarily discusses algorithms that transform these grammars as well as some related regulated language-defining devices, such as regulated grammar systems and pushdown automata, so they satisfy some prescribed desirable properties while the generated languages remain unchanged. It also explains practical and theoretical significance of these transformations. In its conclusion, the book summarizes the main results of the entire book and put them into the context of formal language theory as a whole; in addition, it makes several bibliographical and historical remarks.