A Formalization of Transition Diagram Systems

The transition diagram systems first introduced by Conway are formalized in terms of a restricted deterministic pushdown acceptor (DPDA) called a nested DPDA. It is then established that the class of nested DPDA's is capable of accepting all deterministic context-free languages. The proof of this involves demonstrating that left recursion can be eliminated from deterministic (or LR(k)) grammars without destroying the deterministic property. Using various structural properties of nested DPDA's, one can then establish equivalence results for certain classes of deterministic languages. © 1973, ACM. All rights reserved.