On the Density of Context-Free and Counter Languages

Abstract

A language $L$ is said to be dense if every word in the universe is an infix of some word in $L$. This notion has been generalized from the infix operation to arbitrary word operations $\varrho$ in place of the infix operation ($\varrho$-dense, with infix-dense being the standard notion of dense). It is shown here that it is decidable, for a language $L$ accepted by a one-way nondeterministic reversal-bounded pushdown automaton, whether $L$ is infix-dense. However, it becomes undecidable for both deterministic pushdown automata (with no reversal-bound), and for nondeterministic one-counter automata. When examining suffix-density, it is undecidable for more restricted families such as deterministic one-counter automata that make three reversals on the counter, but it is decidable with less reversals. Other decidability results are also presented on dense languages, and contrasted with a marked version called $\varrho$-marked-density. Also, new languages are demonstrated to be outside various deterministic language families after applying different deletion operations from smaller families. Lastly, bounded-dense languages are defined and examined.