State spaces of convolutional codes (Q676733)

There are various definitions of convolutional codes and each definition leads to a definition of code state space. In the usual definition of a convolutional code generated by a rational encoding matrix the input sequences can be any Laurent series. It is proved that restricting input sequences to be rational functions or restricting output sequences to be finite do not change the code state space but that restricting both input and output sequences to be finite may change the code state space.