Special issue in the honor of the 14th "Journées Montoises d'Informatique Théorique" - Foreword

It is our pleasure to release this special issue in the honor of the “fourteenth Journees Montoises d’Informatique Theorique” which were held at the Universite catholique de Louvain, Belgium, in September 2012. The conference welcomed more than 80 participants, and about forty speakers from several countries such as Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Marocco, Russia, UK, US, . . . In particular, we were honored to hear plenary talks by Profs. Marie-Pierre Beal, Jean Cardinal, Maxime Crochemore, Fabien Durand, Julien Hendrickx, Juhani Karhumaki, and Mikhail Volkov. We have selected twelve papers for this special issue. Each paper has been refereed by at least two independent reviewers. The papers reflect well the rich and various topics of the conference which explore the main challenges in formal language and automata theory and its connections with discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science among which numeration systems and Rauzy fractals, combinatorics on words, repetitions in words and pattern avoidance, morphic words, symbolic dynamics, tree languages, enumeration and asymptotic growth of languages, . . . We wish to heartily thank Isabelle Hisette, Prof. Ph. Lefevre, the F.R.S.-FNRS, and the University for their help and support. Also, this Issue would not have been possible without the help of the many referees. Let them all be thanked for their precious and very serious work. We finally thank Prof. Ch. Choffrut and the editorial staff of RAIRO-TIA for allowing us to publish this special issue.