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turing-lang

A Rust library for parsing .tur and .mtur files, which can construct Turing machines.

Getting started

Running a .tur file

.tur files can be run using the command compute by path/to/binary compute path/to/turfile input where input is a string which has each symbol separated by a space. For example:

> ./turing-machine compute inc.tur '0 0 1 1'

                                        v
_____________________________________0011_______________________________________
                                       v
_____________________________________0010_______________________________________
                                      v
_____________________________________0000_______________________________________
                                      v
_____________________________________0100_______________________________________
    ACCEPTED

How a .tur file is constructed

Let's look at inc.tur and go though it step by step:

# everything after '#' on a line is a comment
# adds one to tape contents if parsed as a binary number
# will overflow, as in input tape '1111' will give output '0000'
states a
syms 0 1
initstate a
table
a 0 HALT 1 N
a 1 a 0 L
a _ HALT . R

The first three lines are comments, and are not considered when building the machine.

  • The states command on line 4 defines the state a. For a state to be usable it has to first be defined with a states command. states can take in any amount of state names separated with spaces.
  • The syms command defines the set of allowed symbols on the tape, in this case 0 and 1. As with states, a symbol needs to be defined with a syms command to be usable.
  • The initstate command defines the initial state of the machine. This can only be used once in a file.
  • The table command signals the start of the machines' transition table and should always be put last in the file. Each line describes a state/action pair of sorts, which takes five tokens (s, r, ns, w, dir). For each computation step, the machine will go though the table in order and do the first action which matches. If the machine is in state s and reads the symbol r it will switch to the state ns, write the symbol w to the tape and move either left (L), right (R) or stay (N). Note that the symbol _ is used on the last line, even though it is not defined anywhere. This is a special blank symbol, and is always defined for every machine.

A machine runs instructions until it reaches a state/symbol pair for which it does not have an instruction. It will then halt. A machine is said to accept its output if and only if it halts in the HALT state. The HALT state is (like the blank symbol) always defined for every machine. You should therefore not define any instructions for the HALT state (e.g. HALT * a _ R).

For the table there are some special characters. * is a wildcard operator, which will match for any symbol. . can be seen as a noop which means "don't switch state/don't write". Or equivalently, "switch to the same state you were in/write what you read". You can also match multiple states or symbols on one line by separating them via a comma but no space. For example a,b,d.

Chaining machines

Anytime a machine is used in a command you send in its path to the .tur file. Machines can be chained via the command chain. For example, the command

turing chain [MACHINE1] [MACHINE2] [OUTPUT]

will take the machines at MACHINE1 and MACHINE2, construct a new Turing machine which operates as the two machines would do in a sequence where the output from the first machine gets fed as input into the other. The resulting .tur file is then written to OUTPUT.

Branching machines

Machines can also be branching via the command branch. It should be used as

turing branch [ENTRY_MACHINE] [BRANCH_SYMS] [BRANCH_MACHINES] [OUTPUT]

The argument ENTRY_MACHINE is the machine which is used as the entry point for the entire program. When ENTRY_MACHINE halts the symbol under the pointer is read. This symbol determines which machine should be chained next. The arguments BRANCH_SYMS and BRANCH_MACHINES are two strings, where BRANCH_SYMS are all relevant symbols separated by a space, and BRANCH_MACHINES are each corresponding machine, also each separated by a space. The resulting .tur file is then written to OUTPUT.

Let's go though an example usage. Assume we have the files nand.tur and and.tur which performs the operations NAND and AND. We also have the machine find_op.tur which will find the left-most operator symbol and then halt on top of it. We can now create a branching machine via the command

turing branch next_op.tur '& D _' 'and.tur nand.tur noop.tur' logic.tur

This creates a machine logic.tur. Let's try running it!

> turing compute logic.tur '0 & 1'

                                        v
______________________________________0&1_______________________________________
                                       v
______________________________________0&1_______________________________________
                                      v
______________________________________0&1_______________________________________
                                     v
______________________________________0&1_______________________________________
                                      v
______________________________________0&1_______________________________________
                                       v
______________________________________0&1_______________________________________
                                       v
______________________________________0&1_______________________________________
                                        v
______________________________________0&1_______________________________________
                                       v
______________________________________0&________________________________________
                                      v
______________________________________0_________________________________________
                                      v
______________________________________1_________________________________________
                                      v
______________________________________0_________________________________________
    ACCEPTED

> turing compute logic.tur '0 D 1'

                                        v
______________________________________0D1_______________________________________
                                       v
______________________________________0D1_______________________________________
                                      v
______________________________________0D1_______________________________________
                                     v
______________________________________0D1_______________________________________
                                      v
______________________________________0D1_______________________________________
                                       v
______________________________________0D1_______________________________________
                                       v
______________________________________0D1_______________________________________
                                        v
______________________________________0D1_______________________________________
                                       v
______________________________________0D________________________________________
                                      v
______________________________________0_________________________________________
                                      v
______________________________________1_________________________________________
    ACCEPTED

We now have a machine which can handle different operators!

Conditional loops

We can create a conditionally looping machine via the loop command.

turing loop [ENTRY_MACHINE] [LOOP_SYMS] [OUTPUT]

Everytime the machine would halt, it instead checks if the current symbol is in LOOP_SYMS. If it is, it simply runs again.

The operation symbols

Symbol Operation
D nand
! not
& and
| or
: generic operation