  This paper shows how the use of Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) in the
style popularized by the process-algebra community can lead to a more succinct
and useful construction for building finite automata from regular expressions.
Such constructions have been known for decades, and form the basis for the
proofs of one direction of Kleene's Theorem. The purpose of the new
construction is, on the one hand, to show students how small automata can be
constructed, without the need for empty transitions, and on the other hand to
show how the construction method admits closure proofs of regular languages
with respect to other operators as well. These results, while not theoretically
surprising, point to an additional influence of process-algebraic research: in
addition to providing fundamental insights into the nature of concurrent
computation, it also sheds new light on old, well-known constructions in
automata theory.
