Hierarchies of aperiodic languages Revue française d ’ automatique informatique recherche opérationnelle

— In recent years, considérable attention has been given to the famüy of aperiqdic languages, also known as star-free languages and noncounting regular languages. Several interesting subfamilies of aperiodic languages have been studied and characterized by the properties of the corresponding syntactic semigroups. The study of such families has been systematized by examining the position of each family in certain natural hiérarchies. This paper gives a brief survey of results in this area.