Chomskian Hierarchies of Families of Sets of Piecewise Continuous Functions

Abstract

The time-honored Chomsky hierarchy has long shown its value as a structural tool in formal languages and automata theory, and gained followers in various areas. We show here how very similar hierarchies can be obtained for families of sets of piecewise continuous functions. We use systems of ordinary differential equations in the same way that automata are used in establishing the traditional Chomsky hierarchy. A functional memory is provided by state-dependent delays which are used in a novel way, paired with certain state components, giving memory structures similar to push-down stores and Turing machine tapes. The resulting machine model may be viewed as a “functional computing machine’’, with functional input, functional memory and, though this is not emphasized here, functional output.