11.4 THE CHOMSKY HIERARCHY
We have now encountered a number of language families, among them the recursively enumerable languages (LRE), the context-sensitive languages (LCS), the context-free languages (LCF), and the regular languages (LREG). One way of exhibiting the relationship between these families is by the Chomsky hierarchy. Noam Chomsky, a founder of formal language theory, provided an initial classification into four language types, type 0 to type 3. This original terminology has persisted, and one finds frequent references to it, but the numeric types are actually different names for the language families we have studied. Type 0 languages are those generated by unrestricted grammars, that is, the recursively enumerable languages. ...
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