On the power of deep pushdown stacks.

Abstract

Inspired by recent work of Meduna on deep pushdown automata, we consider the computational power of a class of basic program schemes, NPSDSs, based around assignments, while-loops and non-deterministic guessing but with access to a deep pushdown stack which, apart from having the usual push and pop instructions, also has deep-push instructions which allow elements to be pushed to stack locations deep within the stack. We syntactically define sub-classes of NPSDSs by restricting the occurrences of pops, pushes and deep-pushes and capture the complexity classes NP and PSPACE. Furthermore, we show that all problems accepted by program schemes of NPSDSs are in EXPTIME.