First entry in November

I kind of forgot that the daylight saving actually was moved to last week in October, so I guess this has a bit of side-effect regarding my physically wellness...

Leaving that aside, we started November with a brand new topic - formal languages. Having briefly skimmed through the near-end of the textbook, the mass amount of symbols is extremely daunting. I felt a bit of relief from today's lecture, where we started everything from scratch.

We were exposed with the definition of alphabets (a set of symbols that is undividable, denoted capital sigma), string (a finite sequence of symbols from capital sigma), and language (all possible strings over capital sigma to capital sigma star), as well as various operations regarding them.

We also get started on regular expressions (the basic definition really) before the time is up. Despite being tired, I still managed to absorb most of the lecture in my head. I find the proof for this type of topic will be interesting, especially when you treat strings (or characters) as normal real/integer numbers.

I find this course to be very beneficial to future computer scientists, from learning the various ways of proving using induction, recursion/iterative proves, correctness proof of programs to this topic (programming languages) and more stuff to come (chapter 8 stuff?), it will surely prepare future computer scientists with a number of important skills that they need.