Introduction to Languages, Machines and Logic

1.1 Overview This chapter briefly describes: • what this book is about • what this book tries to do • what this book tries not to do • a useful feature of the book: the exercises. 1.2 What This Book Is About This book is about three key topics of computer science, namely computable lan­ guages, abstract machines, and logic. Computable languages are related to what are usually known as "formal lan­ guages". I avoid using the latter phrase here because later on in the book I distin­ guish between