On prefixal one-rule string rewrite systems

Abstract

Prefixal one-rule string rewrite systems are one-rule string rewrite systems for which the left-hand side of the rule is a prefix of the right-hand side of the rule. String rewrite systems induce a transformation over languages: from a starting word, one can associate all its descendants. We prove, in this work, that the transformation induced by a prefixal one-rule rewrite system always transforms a finite language into a context-free language, a property that is surprisingly not satisfied by arbitrary one-rule rewrite systems. We also give here a decidable characterization of the prefixal one-rule rewrite systems whose induced transformation is a rational transduction.