The pressing need for eficient compression schemes for XML documents has
recently been focused on stack computation [6, 9], and in particular calls for
a formulation of information-lossless stack or pushdown compressors that allows
a formal analysis of their performance and a more ambitious use of the stack in
XML compression, where so far it is mainly connected to parsing mechanisms. In
this paper we introduce the model of pushdown compressor, based on pushdown
transducers that compute a single injective function while keeping the widest
generality regarding stack computation. The celebrated Lempel-Ziv algorithm
LZ78 [10] was introduced as a general purpose compression algorithm that
outperforms finite-state compressors on all sequences. We compare the
performance of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm with that of the pushdown compressors,
or compression algorithms that can be implemented with a pushdown transducer.
This comparison is made without any a priori assumption on the data's source
and considering the asymptotic compression ratio for infinite sequences. We
prove that Lempel-Ziv is incomparable with pushdown compressors
