Regularity of splicing languages Original Research Article

Motivated by the recombinant behavior of DNA, Tom Head introduced a scheme for the evolution of formal languages called splicing. We give a simpler proof of the fundamental fact that the closure of a regular language under iterated splicing using a finite number of splicing rules is again regular. We then extend this result in two directions, by incorporating circular strings and by using infinite, but regular, sets of splicing rules.