On store languages and applications

Abstract

The store language of a machine of some arbitrary type is the set of all store configurations (state plus store contents but not input) that can appear in an accepting computation. New algorithms and characterizations of store languages are obtained, such as the result that any nondeterministic pushdown automaton augmented with reversal-bounded counters, where the pushdown can “flip” its contents a bounded number of times, can be accepted by a machine with only reversal-bounded counters. Connections are made between store languages and several model checking and reachability problems, such as accepting the set of all predecessor and successor configurations of a machine from a given (regular) set of configurations. For a variety of different machine models often containing multiple parallel data stores, these sets can be accepted with a machine model that is simpler than the original model itself. Store languages are key to showing these properties.