Input-Driven Tissue P Automata

We introduce several variants of input-driven tissue P automata where the rules to be applied only depend on the input symbol. Both strings and multisets are considered as input objects; the strings are either read from an input tape or defined by the sequence of symbols taken in, and the multisets are given in an input cell at the beginning of a computation, enclosed in a vesicle. Additional symbols generated during a computation are stored in this vesicle, too. An input is accepted when the vesicle reaches a final cell and it is empty. The computational power of some variants of input-driven tissue P automata is illustrated by examples and compared with the power of the input-driven variants of other automata as register machines and counter automata

Generalizing input-driven languages: theoretical and practical benefits

Regular languages (RL) are the simplest family in Chomsky's hierarchy. Thanks to their simplicity they enjoy various nice algebraic and logic properties that have been successfully exploited in many application fields. Practically all of their related problems are decidable, so that they support automatic verification algorithms. Also, they can be recognized in real-time. Context-free languages (CFL) are another major family well-suited to formalize programming, natural, and many other classes of languages; their increased generative power w.r.t. RL, however, causes the loss of several closure properties and of the decidability of important problems; furthermore they need complex parsing algorithms. Thus, various subclasses thereof have been defined with different goals, spanning from efficient, deterministic parsing to closure properties, logic characterization and automatic verification techniques. Among CFL subclasses, so-called structured ones, i.e., those where the typical tree-structure is visible in the sentences, exhibit many of the algebraic and logic properties of RL, whereas deterministic CFL have been thoroughly exploited in compiler construction and other application fields. After surveying and comparing the main properties of those various language families, we go back to operator precedence languages (OPL), an old family through which R. Floyd pioneered deterministic parsing, and we show that they offer unexpected properties in two fields so far investigated in totally independent ways: they enable parsing parallelization in a more effective way than traditional sequential parsers, and exhibit the same algebraic and logic properties so far obtained only for less expressive language families

Streaming Property Testing of Visibly Pushdown Languages

In the context of language recognition, we demonstrate the superiority of streaming property testers against streaming algorithms and property testers, when they are not combined. Initiated by Feigenbaum et al., a streaming property tester is a streaming algorithm recognizing a language under the property testing approximation: it must distinguish inputs of the language from those that are $\varepsilon$-far from it, while using the smallest possible memory (rather than limiting its number of input queries). Our main result is a streaming $\varepsilon$-property tester for visibly pushdown languages (VPL) with one-sided error using memory space $\mathrm{poly}((\log n) / \varepsilon)$. This constructions relies on a (non-streaming) property tester for weighted regular languages based on a previous tester by Alon et al. We provide a simple application of this tester for streaming testing special cases of instances of VPL that are already hard for both streaming algorithms and property testers. Our main algorithm is a combination of an original simulation of visibly pushdown automata using a stack with small height but possible items of linear size. In a second step, those items are replaced by small sketches. Those sketches relies on a notion of suffix-sampling we introduce. This sampling is the key idea connecting our streaming tester algorithm to property testers.Comment: 23 pages. Major modifications in the presentatio

Pushdown Control-Flow Analysis of Higher-Order Programs

Context-free approaches to static analysis gain precision over classical approaches by perfectly matching returns to call sites---a property that eliminates spurious interprocedural paths. Vardoulakis and Shivers's recent formulation of CFA2 showed that it is possible (if expensive) to apply context-free methods to higher-order languages and gain the same boost in precision achieved over first-order programs. To this young body of work on context-free analysis of higher-order programs, we contribute a pushdown control-flow analysis framework, which we derive as an abstract interpretation of a CESK machine with an unbounded stack. One instantiation of this framework marks the first polyvariant pushdown analysis of higher-order programs; another marks the first polynomial-time analysis. In the end, we arrive at a framework for control-flow analysis that can efficiently compute pushdown generalizations of classical control-flow analyses.Comment: The 2010 Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programmin

Algebraic properties of structured context-free languages: old approaches and novel developments

The historical research line on the algebraic properties of structured CF languages initiated by McNaughton's Parenthesis Languages has recently attracted much renewed interest with the Balanced Languages, the Visibly Pushdown Automata languages (VPDA), the Synchronized Languages, and the Height-deterministic ones. Such families preserve to a varying degree the basic algebraic properties of Regular languages: boolean closure, closure under reversal, under concatenation, and Kleene star. We prove that the VPDA family is strictly contained within the Floyd Grammars (FG) family historically known as operator precedence. Languages over the same precedence matrix are known to be closed under boolean operations, and are recognized by a machine whose pop or push operations on the stack are purely determined by terminal letters. We characterize VPDA's as the subclass of FG having a peculiarly structured set of precedence relations, and balanced grammars as a further restricted case. The non-counting invariance property of FG has a direct implication for VPDA too.Comment: Extended version of paper presented at WORDS2009, Salerno,Italy, September 200

Defect Particle Kinematics in One-Dimensional Cellular Automata

Let A^Z be the Cantor space of bi-infinite sequences in a finite alphabet A, and let sigma be the shift map on A^Z. A `cellular automaton' is a continuous, sigma-commuting self-map Phi of A^Z, and a `Phi-invariant subshift' is a closed, (Phi,sigma)-invariant subset X of A^Z. Suppose x is a sequence in A^Z which is X-admissible everywhere except for some small region we call a `defect'. It has been empirically observed that such defects persist under iteration of Phi, and often propagate like `particles'. We characterize the motion of these particles, and show that it falls into several regimes, ranging from simple deterministic motion, to generalized random walks, to complex motion emulating Turing machines or pushdown automata. One consequence is that some questions about defect behaviour are formally undecidable.Comment: 37 pages, 9 figures, 3 table