Alexander Meduna, Full Professor of Computer Science at the Brno University of Technology, received his PhD from this university in 1988. From 1988 until 1997, he taught computer science at the University of Missouri—Columbia in the USA. Even more systematically and intensively, since 2000, he has taught computer science and mathematics at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic. Apart from these two universities, however, he has taught computer science at many other American, European and Japanese universities for a shorter period of time. His classes have primarily discussed compiler writing. In addition, they have covered various topics concerning automata, discrete mathematics, formal languages, operating systems, principles of programming languages, and theory of computation.

Alexander Meduna is the author of the book entitled Automata and Languages (Springer, 2000) and a co-author of the book Grammars with Context Conditions and Their Applications (Wiley, 2005). He has published over seventy studies in prominent international journals, such as Acta Informatica (Springer), International Journal of Computer Mathematics (Taylor and Francis), and Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier). All his scientific work discusses compilers, the subject of this book, or closely related topics, such as formal languages and their models. Alexander Meduna’s website is http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~meduna. His scientific work is described at http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~meduna/work in detail.