Enforcing Regular Languages.

We investigate regular languages in the context of the forbidding-enforcing systems introduced by Ehrenfeucht and Rozenberg in the variant where one fe-system defines a single language. In general, these systems may have infinite sets of rules, allowing one to define arbitrary languages. On the other hand when restricted to finite sets, one obtains a strict subclass of the regular languages, between the strictly locally testable and locally testable languages. We further investigate classes of enforcing systems that characterize the regular languages. These systems have infinite sets of enforcers, but can be defined using regular languages (finite state automata). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]