Dennis Pixton
Splicing in abstract families of languages. (8/4/97) ( dvi or postscript)
Theoretical Computer Science, 234 (2000), 135-166.

We prove closure of any full AFL under iterated splicing by a regular H scheme (with some necessary restrictions). The main new idea is the translation of the H system into a formulation using matrices of languages and standard formal language operations (concatenation and quotient). In this setting the splicing language itself can be described in terms of standard operations, and this leads to an algorithm for calculating the splicing language. We also analyze circular splicing.