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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2005
A decomposition of a set X of words over a d-letter alphabet A = {a1,...,ad} is any sequence X1,...,Xd,Y1,...,Yd of subsets of A* such that the sets Xi, i = 1,...,d, are pairwise disjoint, their union is X, and for all i, 1 ≤ i ≤ d, Xi ~ aiYi, where ~ denotes the commutative equivalence relation. We introduce some suitable decompositions that we call good, admissible, and normal. A normal decomposition is admissible and an admissible decomposition is good. We prove that a set is commutatively prefix if and only if it has a normal decomposition. In particular, we consider decompositions of Bernoulli sets and codes. We prove that there exist Bernoulli sets which have no good decomposition. Moreover, we show that the classical conjecture of commutative equivalence of finite maximal codes to prefix ones is equivalent to the statement that any finite and maximal code has an admissible decomposition.