topoSortStates

Returns the topological sort of all states reachable from the initial state. This method assumes that the automaton does not contain cycles, and will throw an IllegalArgumentException if a cycle is detected. The CPU cost is O(numTransitions), and the implementation is non-recursive, so it will not exhaust the java stack for automaton matching long strings. If there are dead states in the automaton, they will be removed from the returned array.

Note: This method uses a deque to iterative the states, which could potentially consume a lot of heap space for some automatons. Specifically, automatons with a deep level of states (i.e., a large number of transitions from the initial state to the final state) may particularly contribute to high memory usage. The memory consumption of this method can be considered as O(N), where N is the depth of the automaton (the maximum number of transitions from the initial state to any state). However, as this method detects cycles, it will never attempt to use infinite RAM.

Parameters