“…For earlier results on various aspects of boundary value problems, spectral theory, and scattering theory in the half-line case (a, b) = (0, ∞), the situation closely related to the principal topic of this paper, we refer, for instance, to [6], [8], [35], [46], [48], [47], [51], [60], [74], [76], [87], [94], [103] (the case of the real line is discussed in [105]). While our treatment of initial value problems was inspired by the one in [94], we permit a more general local behavior of V (·).…”