0 Introduction. - 0. 1 Historical Development. - 0. 2 An Outline of Recent Developments. - 0. 3 Contents of the Monograph. - 1 Preliminaries. - 1. 1 Abstract Reduction Systems. - 1. 2 Reduction Modulo an Equivalence Relation. - 1. 3 Strings Languages and Automata. - 1. 4 Some Turing Machine Constructions. - 1. 5 Bibliographic Remarks. - 2 String-Rewriting Systems. - 2. 1 Rewriting Systems for Strings. - 2. 2 Computing Normal Forms. - 2. 3 Testing for Local Confluence. - 2. 4 The Knuth-Bendix Completion Procedure. - 2. 5 Some Undecidable Properties. - 2. 6 Bibliographic Remarks. - 3 Length as the Basis for Reduction. - 3. 1 Basic Properties. - 3. 2 Testing for Confluence. - 3. 3 Confluence on a Single Class. - 3. 4 Equivalent Systems. - 3. 5 Church-Rosser Congruences. - 3. 6 Other Systems Based on Length. - 3. 7 Bibliographic Remarks. - 4 Monadic String-Rewriting Systems. - 4. 1 Basic Properties. - 4. 2 Specification of Formal Languages. - 4. 3 A Decision Procedure. - 4. 4 Applications of the Decision Procedure. - 4. 5 Limitations of the Decision Procedure. - 4. 6 Bibliographic Remarks. - 5 Length-Reducing Non-Monadic String-Rewriting Systems. - 5. 1 Presenting Recursively Enumerable Languages. - 5. 2 Some Undecidability Results. - 5. 3 Some Questions on Congruential Languages. - 5. 4 Bibliographic Remarks. - 6 Algebraic Protocols. - 6. 1 Basic Properties. - 6. 2 Security and Cascade Protocols. - 6. 3 Security and Name-Stamp Protocols. - 6. 4 Bibliographic Remarks. - 7 Algebraic Properties. - 7. 1 Finite Monoid-Presentations. - 7. 2 Tietze Transformations. - 7. 3 Some Undecidability Results. - 7. 4 The Free Monoid Problem. - 7. 5 The Group Problem. - 7. 6 Bibliographic Remarks. - References. Language: English