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A simple dynamically-typed, (purely) object-oriented language is defined. A structural operational semantics as well as a Hoare-style program logic for reasoning about programs in the language in multiple notions of correctness are given.…
We introduce the notion of density of a rational language with respect to a sequence of probability measures. We prove that if $(\mu_n)$ is a sequence of Bernoulli measures converging to a positive Bernoulli measure $\overline{\mu}$, the…
A language L is closed if L = L*. We consider an operation on closed languages, L-*, that is an inverse to Kleene closure. It is known that if L is closed and regular, then L-* is also regular. We show that the analogous result fails to…
We give a new characterization of $\mathsf{NL}$ as the class of languages whose members have certificates that can be verified with small error in polynomial time by finite state machines that use a constant number of random bits, as…
A classical result by Floyd ("On the non-existence of a phrase structure grammar for ALGOL 60", 1962) states that the complete syntax of any sensible programming language cannot be described by the ordinary kind of formal grammars…
We show that, contrary to the commonly held view, there is a natural and optimal compactness theorem for $\mathrm{L}_{\infty\infty}$ which generalizes the usual compactness theorem for first order logic. The key to this result is the switch…
We investigate the equational theory for Kleene algebra terms with variable complements and constant complements -- (language) complement where it applies only to variables or constants -- w.r.t. languages. While the equational theory…
For $d\ge 1$, a word $w\in \{ 0,1\}^{\Z^d}$ is called balanced if there exists $M > 0$ such that for any two rectangles $R, R^{'}\subset\Z^d$ that are translates of each other, the number of occurrences of the symbol $1$ in $R$ and $R^{'}$…
A group is combable if it can be represented by a language of words satisfying a fellow traveller property; an automatic group has a synchronous combing which is a regular language. This paper gives a systematic analysis of the properties…
Let A be an alphabet and W be a set of words in the free monoid A*. Let S(W) denote the Rees quotient over the ideal of A* consisting of all words that are not subwords of words in W. We call a set of words W finitely based if the monoid…
If F(x) = e^G(x), where F(x) = \sum f(n)x^n and $G(x) = \sum g(n)x^n, with 0 \le g(n) = O(n^{theta n}/n!),theta in (0,1), and gcd(n : g(n) > 0)=1, then f(n) = o(f(n-1)). This gives an answer to Compton's request in Question 8.3 for an…
We define a notion of randomness for individual and collections of formal languages based on automatic martingales acting on sequences of words from some underlying domain. An automatic martingale bets if the incoming word belongs to the…
We study various complexity properties of suffix-free regular languages. The quotient complexity of a regular language $L$ is the number of left quotients of $L$; this is the same as the state complexity of $L$. A regular language $L'$ is a…
In algebraic terms, the insertion of $n$-powers in words may be modelled at the language level by considering the pseudovariety of ordered monoids defined by the inequality $1\le x^n$. We compare this pseudovariety with several other…
The density of a rational language can be understood as the frequency of some "pattern" in the shift space, for example a pattern like "words with an even number of a given letter." We study the density of group languages, i.e. rational…
This article fits in the area of research that investigates the application of topological duality methods to problems that appear in theoretical computer science. One of the eventual goals of this approach is to derive results in…
A classic result in formal language theory is the equivalence among non-counting, or aperiodic, regular languages, and languages defined through star-free regular expressions, or first-order logic. Past attempts to extend this result beyond…
A language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is suffix-convex if, for any words $x,y,z\in\Sigma^*$, whenever $z$ and $xyz$ are in $L$, then so is $yz$. Suffix-convex languages include three special cases: left-ideal, suffix-closed, and…
A set of binary random variables indexed by a lattice torus is considered. Under a mixing hypothesis, the probability of any proposition belonging to the first order logic of colored graphs tends to 0 or 1, as the size of the lattice tends…
We study the language-theoretic properties of the word problem, in the sense of Duncan & Gilman, of weakly compressible monoids, as defined by Adian & Oganesian. We show that if $\mathcal{C}$ is a reversal-closed super-$\operatorname{AFL}$,…