Existence of constants in regular splicing languages

Abstract

In spite of wide investigations of finite splicing systems in formal language theory, basic questions, such as their characterization, remain unsolved. It has been conjectured that a necessary condition for a regular language L to be a splicing language is that L must have a constant in the Schützenberger sense. We prove this longstanding conjecture to be true. The result is based on properties of strongly connected components of the minimal deterministic finite state automaton for a regular splicing language. Using constants of the corresponding languages, we also provide properties of transitive automata and path-automata.