It is a well-known result that the set of reachable stack contents in a pushdown automaton is a regular set of words. We consider the more general case of higher-order pushdown automata and investigate, with a particular stress on effectiveness and complexity, the natural notion of regularity for higher-order stacks: a set of level k stacks is regular if it is obtained by a regular sequence of level k operations. We prove that any regular set of level k stacks admits a normalized representation and we use it to show that the regular sets of a given level form an effective Boolean algebra. In fact, this notion of regularity coincides with the notion of monadic second order definability over the canonical structure associated to level k stacks. Finally, we consider the link between regular sets of stacks and families of infinite graphs defined by higher-order pushdown systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.
CITATION STYLE
Carayol, A. (2005). Regular sets of higher-order pushdown stacks. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 3618, pp. 168–179). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/11549345_16
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