Vertex Sequences Induced by Chains1

In the three preliminary sections to the article we define two operations on finite sequences which seem to be of general interest. The first is the cut operation that extracts a contiguous chunk of a finite sequence from a position to a position. The second operation is a glueing catenation that given two finite sequences catenates them with removal of the first element of the second sequence. The main topic of the article is to define an operation which for a given chain in a graph returns the sequence of vertices through which the chain passes. We define the exact conditions when such an operation is uniquely definable. This is done with the help of the so called two-valued alternating finite sequences. We also prove theorems about the existence of simple chains which are subchains of a given chain. In order to do this we define the notion of a finite subsequence of a typed finite sequence.