A basic class of symmetric orthogonal polynomials of a discrete variable

By using a generalization of Sturm-Liouville problems in discrete spaces, a basic class of symmetric orthogonal polynomials of a discrete variable with four free parameters, which generalizes all classical discrete symmetric orthogonal polynomials, is introduced. The standard properties of these polynomials, such as a second order difference equation, an explicit form for the polynomials, a three term recurrence relation and an orthogonality relation are presented. It is shown that two hypergeometric orthogonal sequences with 20 different weight functions can be extracted from this class. Moreover, moments corresponding to these weight functions can be explicitly computed. Finally, a particular example containing all classical discrete symmetric orthogonal polynomials is studied in detail.