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Pumping, with or Without Choice

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11893))

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Abstract

We present the first machine-checked formalization of Jaffe and Ehrenfeucht, Parikh and Rozenberg’s (EPR) pumping lemmas in the Coq proof assistant. We formulate regularity in terms of finite derivatives, and prove that both Jaffe’s pumping property and EPR’s block pumping property precisely characterize regularity. We illuminate EPR’s classical proof that the block cancellation property implies regularity, and discover that—as best we can tell—their proof relies on the Axiom of Choice. We provide a new proof which eliminates the use of Choice. We explicitly construct a function which computes block cancelable languages from well-formed short languages.

Aquinas Hobor is supported in part by Yale-NUS College grant R-607-265-322-121. Elaine Li is supported in part by Runtime Verification, Inc. Frank Stephan is supported in part by MOE AcRF Tier 2 grant MOE2016-T2-1-019/R146-000-234-112. Authors are ordered alphabetically.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In our Coq development, we define block_cancellable_matching_with as the two-sided cancellation property, i.e. both L and L’s complement satisfy it, while block_cancellable_with refers to the one-sided cancellation (pumping) property. The same applies for the block pumping property.

  2. 2.

    We postpone discussion of why this condition works until Sect. 5.3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore

    Aquinas Hobor & Elaine Li

  2. School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Aquinas Hobor & Frank Stephan

  3. Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Frank Stephan

Authors
  1. Aquinas Hobor
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  2. Elaine Li
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  3. Frank Stephan
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Correspondence to Elaine Li .

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  1. University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Anthony Widjaja Lin

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Hobor, A., Li, E., Stephan, F. (2019). Pumping, with or Without Choice. In: Lin, A. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11893. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_22

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