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The linear landscape of external contextual languages

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Abstract

The class of external contextual languages isstrictly included in the class of linear languages. A reason for the strict inclusion in linear languages is that external contextual grammars generate languages in the exhaustive way: each sentential form belongs to the language of a grammar.

In this paper we study the effect of adding various squeezing mechanisms to the basic classes of exhaustive contextual grammars. We obtain in this way a characterization of linear languages and a whole landscape of sublinear families. By restricting the contexts to be one-sided (only left-sided or only right-sided) we obtain a characterization of regular languages — here the subregular landscape reduces to two families.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 80309, Boulder, CO, USA

    Andrzej Ehrenfeucht

  2. Institute of Mathematics, Romanian Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 1 - 764, RO-70700, Bucureşti, Romania

    Gheorghe Păun

  3. Department of Computer Science, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9512, 2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Grzegorz Rozenberg

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 80309, Boulder, CO, USA

    Grzegorz Rozenberg

Authors
  1. Andrzej Ehrenfeucht
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  2. Gheorghe Păun
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  3. Grzegorz Rozenberg
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Additional information

Research supported by Basic Research ASMICS II Working Group and the Academy of Finland, Project 11281

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Ehrenfeucht, A., Păun, G. & Rozenberg, G. The linear landscape of external contextual languages. Acta Informatica 33, 571–593 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03036464

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03036464

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