COMPLETELY DISJUNCTIVE LANGUAGES

A language over a finite alphabet X is called disjunctive if the principal congruence PL determined by L is the equality. A dense language is a language which has non-empty intersection with any two-sided ideal of the free monoid X* generated by the alphabet X. We call an infinite language L completely disjunctive (completely dense) if every infinite subset of L is disjunctive (dense). For a language L, if every dense subset of L is disjunctive, then we call L quasi-completely disjunctive. In this paper, (for the case IXI ≥ 2) we show that every completely disjunctive language is completely dense and conversely. Characterizations of completely disjunctive languages and quasi-completely disjunctive languages were obtained. We also discuss some operations on the families of languages

Detecting palindromes, patterns, and borders in regular languages

Given a language L and a nondeterministic finite automaton M, we consider whether we can determine efficiently (in the size of M) if M accepts at least one word in L, or infinitely many words. Given that M accepts at least one word in L, we consider how long a shortest word can be. The languages L that we examine include the palindromes, the non-palindromes, the k-powers, the non-k-powers, the powers, the non-powers (also called primitive words), the words matching a general pattern, the bordered words, and the unbordered words.Comment: Full version of a paper submitted to LATA 2008. This is a new version with John Loftus added as a co-author and containing new results on unbordered word