Grammars as Processes

In 1999 I met Grzegorz Rozenberg in Amsterdam, while I was attending the ETAPS conference and he was taking part in a meeting. The next day I was giving a talk with the title “Grammars as Processes”, and Grzegorz, who had seen it announced in the program, asked me about it. We had little time, and so I could barely sketch the contents. I think Grzegorz would have liked the talk, because it pointed out an interesting connection between two ofhis oldest loves, formal languages and concurrency theory, and showed how a model of computation derived from this connection has a natural application in the area of program analysis. He would have also liked to see how an abstract result obtained by Buchi in 1964 on regular canonical systems was the basis to new algorithms for the analysis of software. This paper is a written version oft he talk, and it also surveys the new results obtained since 1999. Sections 3 and 4 are taken from the Ph. D. Thesis of Richard Mayr [21], and have also been published in [22].

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