Grail+ Software

Grail How To

What is Grail?

Grail ( Grail+ mirror)) is a software package for symbolic computation, used for manipulating automata, languages, regular expressions, and other formal language theory objects.

Grail was developed at the Computers Science Department at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. Now UPEI is actively developing Grail, even if Western University owns the copyright. Grail+ is intended for use in teaching and research. The Grail+ project was coordinated by Dr. Sheng Yu(1950-2012), professor of Computer Science at the University of Western Ontario.

The original work on the Grail project was done by Darrell Raymond and Derick Wood and it was published as a technical reports in:

and in Journal of Symbolic Computation, Volume 17 , Issue 4, 341-350 (April 1994)   Grail: A C++ Library for Automata and Expressions  local copy

At CSIT department @UPEI we are using the latest version of GRAIL+. The work of updating Grail+ code to current C++ standards as well as adding new filters was done by a research group from Louisiana Tech University, under the supervision of Dr. Andrei Păun.

Currently the Grail+ software is developed at UPEI under the supervision of Dr. Cezar Câmpeanu.

The Java Graphical User Interface for Grail+ (JGRAIL) is developed at UPEI under the supervision of Dr. Cezar Câmpeanu. The developers hired for this project were Aaron Cooper, Sebastian Harko, and Max Ahlquist. For more information about this project you can check the CSIT Technical Reports at UPEI or the departmental website.

Copyright information

Please, note that Grail+ is not free. No commercial use of Grail+ is permitted without prior, express, written consent. No part of Grail+ may be included in a commercial product or used on a commercial problem without prior, express, written consent.

JGrail is free.

Grail+/JGrail documentation

The new documents for the newer versions of Grail (Grail+ 3.0 and Grail+ 3.1), have not been released yet. However, most of the functions are implemented in earlier versions.
The following documents are available:

Using Grail+/JGrail at UPEI

The Grail+ software is available on all Linux machines in the UNIX laboratory.

For the GUI you can use the command jgrail on all Linux machines in the UNIX laboratory.

First time you use jgrail, a hidden directory ".jgrail" is created in your home directory. Sometimes the file ".jgrail/jgrail.conf" must be edited (by hand) to make sure your configuration paths are correct.

You can download the latest version of the Grail+ package from UPEI.


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Last modified:Wednesday October 18, 2023 at 02:01 pm
Cezar Câmpeanu