Copyright © 2007 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.
On the existence of prime decompositions
Available online 23 January 2007.
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Abstract
We investigate factorizations of regular languages in terms of prime languages. A language is said to be strongly prime decomposable if any way of factorizing it yields a prime decomposition in a finite number of steps. We give a characterization of the strongly prime decomposable regular languages and using the characterization we show that every regular language over a unary alphabet has a prime decomposition. We show that there exist non-regular unary languages that do not have prime decompositions. We also consider infinite factorizations of unary languages.
Keywords: Language decompositions; Primality; Unary languages







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