v6.0.0

Automata v6 is a major new release with new features and a few breaking changes that keep the library moving forward. Big thanks to @abhinavsinha-adrino and @eliotwrobson for most of these improvements.

New Features

• A new GNFA class to represent generalized non-deterministic finite automata (thanks @abhinavsinha-adrino!)
  • Please see the README for documentation on this new class
• A new automata.base.regex module with utilities for working with
  automata-style regular expressions; a new NFA.to_regex method has also been added
  • Please see the README for documentation on this new module
• A new NFA.eliminate_lambda method to return an NFA with lambda/epsilon
  transitions removed (#31)
• Significant performance optimizations to various DFA methods (thanks
  @eliotwrobson!):
  • DFA.from_nfa
  • DFA.isempty
  • DFA.isfinite
  • DFA.__eq__

Breaking Changes

• Added networkx as a required dependency, providing substantial performance improvements for certain DFA/NFA methods, and also streamlining the code to improve maintainability
• Dropped Python 3.6 support, since it has been end-of-life since December 2021. Python 3.7 is currently the minimum version of Python required by this library.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with NFA.kleene_star() where outgoing transitions for every final state were required (but shouldn't be)
• Fixed a bug where the DFA union and intersection operations were not returning the correct type if you had subclassed from DFA