A pumping lemma for flip-pushdown languages

Kostolányi, Peter

RAIRO - Theoretical Informatics and Applications - Informatique Théorique et Applications, 7th Non-Classical Models of Automata and Applications (NCMA-2015) , Tome 50 (2016) no. 4, pp. 295-311

Flip-pushdown automata are pushdown automata with an extra ability to reverse the contents of the pushdown store. A generalisation of the pumping lemma for context-free languages is presented, which applies to the families of languages accepted by flip-pushdown automata with $k$ pushdown flips, for an arbitrary constant $k$. The presented result gives rise to a new technique for disproving existence of flip-pushdown automata with a constant number of flips, which is significantly simpler compared to methods used for this purpose so far.

Classification : 68Q45
Keywords: Pumping lemma, flip-pushdown automaton, flip-pushdown language, reversal-generating context-free grammar

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