Aperiodicity, Star-freeness, and First-order Definability of Structured Context-Free Languages

A classic result in formal language theory is the equivalence among noncounting, or aperiodic, regular languages, and languages defined through star-free regular expressions, or first-order logic. Together with first-order completeness of linear temporal logic these results constitute a theoretical foundation for model-checking algorithms. Extending these results to structured subclasses of context-free languages, such as tree-languages did not work as smoothly: for instance W. Thomas showed that there are star-free tree languages that are counting. We show, instead, that investigating the same properties within the family of operator precedence languages leads to equivalences that perfectly match those on regular languages. The study of this old family of context-free languages has been recently resumed to enhance not only parsing (the original motivation of its inventor R. Floyd) but also to exploit their algebraic and logic properties. We have been able to reproduce the classic results of regular languages for this much larger class by going back to string languages rather than tree languages. Since operator precedence languages strictly include other classes of structured languages such as visibly pushdown languages, the same results given in this paper hold as trivial corollary for that family too

Entropy of regular timed languages

For timed languages, we define size measures: volume for languages with a fixed finite number of events, and entropy (growth rate) as asymptotic measure for an unbounded number of events. These measures can be used for quantitative comparison of languages, and the entropy can be viewed as information contents of a timed language. For languages accepted by deterministic timed automata, we give exact formulas for volumes. We show that automata with non-vanishing entropy ("thick") have a normal (non-Zeno, discretizable etc.) behavior for typical runs. Next, we characterize the entropy, using methods of functional analysis, as the logarithm of the leading eigenvalue (spectral radius) of a positive integral operator. We devise a couple of methods to compute the entropy: a symbolical one for so-called "1 1 ⁄2-clock" automata, and a numerical one (with a guarantee of convergence)