DFA has two different meanings depending on the context:
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In Major League Baseball (MLB), DFA stands for "Designated for Assignment". When a players contract is designated for assignment, that player is immediately removed from his clubs 40-man roster. Within seven days of the transaction, the player can either be traded or placed on irrevocable outright waivers. If the player is claimed off waivers by another team, the claiming team would be taking on the remainder of the contract as well. If the player is not claimed, he can be sent to the minor leagues, released, or outrighted to the teams minor league system.
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In computer science, a DFA stands for "Deterministic Finite Automaton". It is a mathematical concept used to solve various specific problems such as lexical analysis. A DFA is a finite-state machine that accepts or rejects a given string of symbols, by running through a state sequence uniquely determined by the string. In DFA, for each input symbol, one can determine the state to which the machine will move. A DFA has a start state where computations begin, and a set of accept states which help define when a computation is successful.
