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i got this question in a theory of computation quiz "give pda for a^(n) b^(2n) c^(2n) d^(n)"

i am arguing that there is no pda for that question but our ta says that we can push 5x to the stack then pop x each time we read a b or c or d. i am arguing that doesn't guarantee count because we might get only "d"s which one of us is right

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  • $\begingroup$ Neither of your arguments are really sound. If you want to prove that the language is not context-free, you should try with the pumping lemma. $\endgroup$
    – Nathaniel
    Jan 3 at 12:43

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You are right that the suggestion of the TA does not work. Using that approach one will accept $\{\; a^n b^i c^k d^\ell \mid 5n = i+j+\ell \;\}$. We can force the PDA to make $i$ and $j$ even, but that will not help much.

Of course this does not prove that there is no PDA for the language $K = \{\;a^nb^{2n}c^{2n}d^n \mid n\ge 1\;\}$ : another clever technique might work.

Recall that $L = \{\;a^nb^nc^n\mid n\ge 1\;\}$ is a very similar language, known not te be context-free. Hence it is intuitively clear that also your language is not context-free.

To formally show that one might use the direct approach and use the pumping lemma for CF languages to show it is not context-free. Alternatively one may use closure properties of the context-free languages to show that if $K$ is context-free then so is $L$ (leading to a contradiction). Informally the language operations you need would be halving the number of $b$'s and $c$'s and deleting the $d$'s. Formally those can be "implemented" by homomorphisms and their inverses. Those operations map letters to words.

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