In the classical theory of regular languages, the concept of recognition by profinite monoids is an important tool. Beyond regularity, Boolean spaces with internal monoids (BiMs) were recently proposed as a generalization. On the other hand, fragments of logic defining regular languages can be studied inductively via the so-called “Substitution Principle.” In this paper, we make the logical underpinnings of this principle explicit and extend it to arbitrary languages using Stone duality. Subsequently, we show how it can be used to obtain topo-algebraic recognizers for classes of languages defined by a wide class of first-order logic fragments. This naturally leads to a notion of semidirect product of BiMs extending the classical such construction for profinite monoids. Our main result is a generalization of Almeida and Weil’s Decomposition Theorem for semidirect products from the profinite setting to that of BiMs. This is a crucial step in a program to extend the profinite methods of regular language theory to the setting of complexity theory.

Robustness is a property of system analyses, namely monotonic maps from the complete lattice of subsets of a (system’s state) space to the two-point lattice. The definition of robustness requires the space to be a metric space. Robust analyses cannot discriminate between a subset of the metric space and its closure; therefore, one can restrict to the complete lattice of closed subsets. When the metric space is compact, the complete lattice of closed subsets ordered by reverse inclusion is $\omega$-continuous, and robust analyses are exactly the Scott-continuous maps. Thus, one can also ask whether a robust analysis is computable (with respect to a countable base). The main result of this paper establishes a relation between robustness and Scott continuity when the metric space is not compact. The key idea is to replace the metric space with a compact Hausdorff space, and relate robustness and Scott continuity by an adjunction between the complete lattice of closed subsets of the metric space and the $\omega$-continuous lattice of closed subsets of the compact Hausdorff space. We demonstrate the applicability of this result with several examples involving Banach spaces.