On the existence of prime decompositions

We investigate factorizations of regular languages in terms of prime languages. A language is said to be strongly prime decomposable if any way of factorizing it yields a prime decomposition in a finite number of steps. We give a characterization of the strongly prime decomposable regular languages and using the characterization we show that every regular language over a unary alphabet has a prime decomposition. We show that there exist non-regular unary languages that do not have prime decompositions. We also consider infinite factorizations of unary languages. c © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.