Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2002
We present a uniform and easy-to-use technique fordeciding the equivalenceproblem for deterministic monadic linear recursive programs. The key ideais to reduce this problem to the well-known group-theoretic problems byrevealing an algebraic nature of program computations. We show thatthe equivalence problem for monadic linear recursive programs over finiteand fixed alphabets of basic functions and logical conditions is decidablein polynomial time for the semantics based on the free monoids and freecommutative monoids.