Question

In certain programming languages, comments appear between delimiters such as and Let be the language of all valid delimited comment strings. A member of

must begin with and end with but have no intervening
For simplicity, assume that the alphabet for is
a. Give a that recognizes
b. Give a regular expression that generates

Answer 1

The language of all valid delimited comment strings can be recognized by a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) using a regular expression.

Step-by-step explanation:

The language of all valid delimited comment strings can be recognized by a deterministic finite automaton (DFA). A DFA is defined as a 5-tuple (Q, Σ, δ, q0, F), where:

1. Q is a finite set of states
2. Σ is a finite alphabet
3. δ is a transition function
4. q0 is the initial state
5. F is a set of accepting states

For the given language, the DFA can have two states - an initial state and a final state. The transition function is defined based on the input alphabet a. The regular expression that generates the language can be written as (a*)* or (a∪ε)*, where * indicates zero or more repetitions and ε represents the empty string.