Functional MSO transductions, deterministic two-way transducers, as well as streaming string transducers are all equivalent models for regular functions. In this paper, we show that every regular function, either on finite words or on infinite words, captured by a deterministic two-way transducer, can be described with a regular transducer expression (RTE). For infinite words, the transducer uses Muller acceptance and ω-regular look-ahead. RTEs are constructed from constant functions using the combinators if-then-else (deterministic choice), Hadamard product, and unambiguous versions of the Cauchy product, the 2-chained Kleene-iteration and the 2chained omega-iteration. Our proof works for transformations of both finite and infinite words, extending the result on finite words of Alur et al. in LICS'14. In order to construct an RTE associated with a deterministic two-way Muller transducer with look-ahead, we introduce the notion of transition monoid for such two-way transducers where the look-ahead is captured by some backward deterministic Büchi automaton. Then, we use an unambiguous version of Imre Simon's famous forest factorization theorem in order to derive a "good" (ω-)regular expression for the domain of the two-way transducer. "Good" expressions are unambiguous and Kleene-plus as well as ω-iterations are only used on subexpressions corresponding to idempotent elements of the transition monoid. The combinator expressions are finally constructed by structural induction on the "good" (ω-)regular expression describing the domain of the transducer.
Regular functions from infinite words to infinite words can be equivalently
specified by MSO-transducers, streaming $\omega$-string transducers as well as
deterministic two-way transducers with look-ahead. In their one-way
restriction, the latter transducers define the class of rational functions.
Even though regular functions are robustly characterised by several
finite-state devices, even the subclass of rational functions may contain
functions which are not computable (by a Turing machine with infinite input).
This paper proposes a decision procedure for the following synthesis problem:
given a regular function $f$ (equivalently specified by one of the
aforementioned transducer model), is $f$ computable and if it is, synthesize a
Turing machine computing it.
For regular functions, we show that computability is equivalent to
continuity, and therefore the problem boils down to deciding continuity. We
establish a generic characterisation of continuity for functions preserving
regular languages under inverse image (such as regular functions). We exploit
this characterisation to show the decidability of continuity (and hence
computability) of rational and regular functions. For rational functions, we
show that this can be done in $\mathsf{NLogSpace}$ (it was already known to be
in $\mathsf{PTime}$ by Prieur). In a similar fashion, we also effectively
characterise uniform continuity of regular functions, and relate it to the
notion of uniform computability, which offers stronger efficiency guarantees.
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