We define formal languages as a codataype of infinite trees
branching over the alphabet. Each node in such a tree indicates whether the
path to this node constitutes a word inside or outside of the language. This
codatatype is isormorphic to the set of lists representation of languages,
but caters for definitions by corecursion and proofs by coinduction.
Regular operations on languages are then defined by primitive corecursion.
A difficulty arises here, since the standard definitions of concatenation and
iteration from the coalgebraic literature are not primitively
corecursive-they require guardedness up-to union/concatenation.
Without support for up-to corecursion, these operation must be defined as a
composition of primitive ones (and proved being equal to the standard
definitions). As an exercise in coinduction we also prove the axioms of
Kleene algebra for the defined regular operations.
Furthermore, a language for context-free grammars given by productions in
Greibach normal form and an initial nonterminal is constructed by primitive
corecursion, yielding an executable decision procedure for the word problem
without further ado.
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