Elsevier

Information Sciences

Volume 31, Issue 1, October 1983, Pages 77-89
Information Sciences

Insertion languages

https://doi.org/10.1016/0020-0255(83)90023-3Get rights and content

Abstract

The operations of insertion ( ← ) and iterated insertion ( ← ) are simple variants of Kleene's operations · and ∗ [15] in a manner similar to the operations shuffle and iterated shuffle (see e.g. [13, 23, 20, 14]). Using the operation of iterated insertion, we can generate both the semi-Dyck and the two-sided Dyck languages from certain finite subsets of these languages. Thus the class of languages of the form S for finite S forms a natural class of generalized Dyck languages. This class is equivalent to the class of pure unitary languages discussed in [6]. We investigate this class further, by examining for it the problems of equivalence, ambiguity, and determinism, all of which are easily decidable. On the other hand, we show that the problem “S∗ ∩ T∗ = {λ}?” is undecidable for finite, unambiguous S and T. Furthermore, by extending the regular expressions to include the operations ← and , we obtain the class of insertion languages which generalizes both the regular languages and the Dyck languages, but is properly contained within the class of context-free languages. Our main result here is that the problem “L = ∑?” is undecidable for the class of insertion languages. From this result, it follows that the equivalence problem and the problem “IsL regular?” are also undecidable for this class.

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