Logic and Language Models for Computer Science

This book invites the reader to explore abstractions that are crucial to computer science. The authors bring a sense of excitement to logics, formal languages and automata—motivating topics by linking them to computing and to computational applications, sometime with whole chapters. They achieve exceptional clarity through a plethora of examples and figures, yet without-losing sight of, and indeed celebrating, the precision that is the hallmark of this subject matter.

Features of the book include:

• application of logic to program verification
• programming in the logic language, Prolog
• discussion of "why" and "how" to prove things
• relationships between English and programming languages
• diagrams-first approach to automata
• lex as a tool and an extension of formal language
• pushdown automata as parsing strategies
• Turing machines as models of computation

Henry Hamburger is a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University.

Dana Richards is an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University.