In this paper, we survey the rich theory of infinite episturmian words which generalize to any finite alphabet, in a rather resembling way, the well-known family of Sturmian words on two letters. After recalling definitions and basic properties, we consider episturmian morphisms that allow for a deeper study of these words. Some properties of factors are described, including factor complexity, palindromes, fractional powers, frequencies, and return words. We also consider lexicographical properties of episturmian words, as well as their connection to the balance property, and related notions such as finite episturmian words, Arnoux-Rauzy sequences, and “episkew words” that generalize the skew words of Morse and Hedlund.

The algebraic study of formal languages shows that ω-rational sets correspond precisely to the ω-languages recognizable by finite ω-semigroups. Within this framework, we provide a construction of the algebraic counterpart of the Wagner hierarchy. We adopt a hierarchical game approach, by translating the Wadge theory from the ω-rational language to the ω-semigroup context. More precisely, we first show that the Wagner degree is indeed a syntactic invariant. We then define a reduction relation on finite pointed ω-semigroups by means of a Wadge-like infinite two-player game. The collection of these algebraic structures ordered by this reduction is then proven to be isomorphic to the Wagner hierarchy, namely a well-founded and decidable partial ordering of width 2 and height ωω.

The algebraic counterpart of the Wagner hierarchy consists of a well-founded and decidable classification of finite pointed ω-semigroups of width 2 and height ωω. This paper completes the description of this algebraic hierarchy. We first give a purely algebraic decidability procedure of this partial ordering by introducing a graph representation of finite pointed ω-semigroups allowing to compute their precise Wagner degrees. The Wagner degree of any ω-rational language can therefore be computed directly on its syntactic image. We then show how to build a finite pointed ω-semigroup of any given Wagner degree. We finally describe the algebraic invariants characterizing every degree of this hierarchy.

Mainstream object-oriented languages often fail to provide complete powerful features altogether, such as, multiple inheritance, dynamic overloading and copy semantics of inheritance. In this paper we present a core object-oriented imperative language that integrates all these features in a formal framework. We define a static type system and a translation of the language into the meta-language λ_object,, in order to account for semantic issues and prove type safety of our proposal.

This paper gives a shortest path algorithm for CFG (context free grammar) labeled and weighted digraphs where edge weights may be positive or negative, but negative-weight cycles are not allowed in the underlying unlabeled graph. These results build directly on an algorithm of Barrett et al. [SIAM J. Comput.30 (2000) 809–837]. In addition to many other results, they gave a shortest path algorithm for CFG labeled and weighted digraphs where all edges are nonnegative. Our algorithm is based closely on Barrett et al.'s algorithm as well as Johnson's algorithm for shortest paths in digraphs whose edges may have positive or negative weights.

We propose a new way of characterizing the complexity of online problems. Instead of measuring the degradation of the output quality caused by the ignorance of the future we choose to quantify the amount of additional global information needed for an online algorithm to solve the problem optimally. In our model, the algorithm cooperates with an oracle that can see the whole input. We define the advice complexity of the problem to be the minimal number of bits (normalized per input request, and minimized over all algorithm-oracle pairs) communicated by the algorithm to the oracle in order to solve the problem optimally. Hence, the advice complexity measures the amount of problem-relevant information contained in the input. We introduce two modes of communication between the algorithm and the oracle based on whether the oracle offers an advice spontaneously (helper) or on request (answerer). We analyze the Paging and DiffServ problems in terms of advice complexity and deliver upper and lower bounds in both communication modes; in the case of DiffServ problem in helper mode the bounds are tight.

We prove that every Sturmian word ω has infinitely many prefixes of the form UnVn3, where |Un| < 2.855|Vn| and limn→∞|Vn| = ∞. In passing, we give a very simple proof of the known fact that every Sturmian word begins in arbitrarily long squares.

Labelling problems for graphs consist in building distributed data structures, making it possible to check a given graph property or to compute a given function, the arguments of which are vertices. For an inductively computable function D, if G is a graph with n vertices and of clique-width at most k, where k is fixed, we can associate with each vertex x of G a piece of information (bit sequence) lab(x) of length O(log2(n)) such that we can compute D in constant time, using only the labels of its arguments. The preprocessing can be done in time O(h.n) where h is the height of the syntactic tree of G. We perform an inductive computation, without using the tools of monadic second order logic. This enables us to give an explicit labelling scheme and to avoid constants of exponential size.

It is shown that the class of left-to-right regular languages coincides with the class of languages that are accepted by monotone deterministic RL-automata, in this way establishing a close correspondence between a classical parsing algorithm and a certain restricted type of analysis by reduction.