On block pumpable languages

Abstract

Ehrenfeucht, Parikh and Rozenberg gave an interesting characterisation of the regular languages called the block pumping property. When requiring this property only with respect to members of the language but not with respect to nonmembers, one gets the notion of block pumpable languages. It is shown that these block pumpable are a more general concept than regular languages and that they are an interesting notion of their own: they are closed under intersection, union and homomorphism by transducers; they admit multiple pumping; they have either polynomial or exponential growth.