Formal Languages and Compilers notes

This repository contains the notes for the Formal Languages and Compilers course, relative to the 2022/2023 class of Computer Science and Engineering held at Politecnico di Milano.

Check below if you want to contribute!

Latex compilation notes

The compilation of this LaTeX document is slightly problematic due to the intensive use of the tikz library.

If you are using VScode with the LaTeX Workshop extension, and you have Python (3.6+) installed on your computer, you have nothing to worry about, as I have set up the environment to work regardless of the adversities. Just keep in mind that the first compilation might take a while (up to a minute) due to the needed rendering of all the figures.

Otherwise, keep reading. Due to its awesomely user friendly features, the user must:

• Create an empty folder called tikztemp in the repository root to hold all the temporary files it generates (note that this folder is already in the repository)
• Have a .tikzstyles file holding, well, all the styles used by tikz
• Enable a special flag (--shell-escape) on the compiler
• Compile using latexpdf, as I have not tried anything else

Furthermore, due to the cryptic and mysterious nature of the tikz figures format, I have been using another program called TikZiT to help me draw figure without completely losing my mind. Sadly, this program introduced even more annoyances, like the increased incompatibility of the tikzstyles file it generates with the default, vanilla, tikz library. In order to to fix this, I have created a Python script cleantikz.py that will clean the aforementioned file to remove all the fields that TikZit adds.

Shall you ever edit the tikzstyle.tikzsyles file, remember to call the script, or the document won't compile!

Finally, remember that the first compilation, due to the externalization of the images, will take a while. Don't panic!

Questions

The notes are not consistent with the lectures. Why?

I found the lectures quite messy, without a clear ordering or a well defined sequence of topics. This is why many chapters and sections in my notes are out of order with respect to the slides.

The document does not compile. Can you help me?

Have you checked the README? Go back to the section above and read it again.

If it still does not work, open an issue.

You made a mistake! How can that be fixed?

If you noticed and you feel kind enough to do the work for me, clone the repo and send me a pull request.

If you aren't feeling it, send me a message via email or open a discussion on GitHub.

The thing you wrote does not make any sense! Can you fix it?

Sometimes I forget how to write as English is not my primary languages and the sentences lose all meaning. If you spot one, follow the same steps as above

Why are you doing this?

I have always liked having clean notes on the courses I take and I do enjoy this process a lot. I figured out that if I was doing this for myself, I could as well share my work with everyone else.

I just hope that these notes will help someone!

Licensing

These notes are distributed under Creative Commons 4.0 license.