Programming challenge: wildcard exclusion in cartesian products

[Dinko Tenev]

wkehowski at cox.net wrote:
> Call a wc 'free' if it satisfies the propery that every letter 'a' in
> it appears only in the form '*a*', and 'anchored' otherwise. What if
> all wc's are free? How does this affect the DFA? Does it minimize
> nontrivially? Keep in mind I'm new to DFA theory.

There would be no difference for single patterns, but I'm not sure into
how large a DFA a set of those would combine.


Cheers,

Dinko