SAFE TURING MACHINES, GRZEGORCZYK CLASSES AND POLYTIME

We introduce a class of safe Turing machines which execute structured while, if-then- else programs and operate on stacks and on a read-only input tape. A hierarchy is obtained by taking as Si the class of all functions computed by programs of loop-depth i. The main result is that S1 equals Lintime and S2 equals Polytime while, for i≥3, we have that Si equals the i-th Grzegorczyk class. By adding to the language a non-deterministic construct choose we take S2 into a class equivalent to NP. This gives a syntactical characterization in a pure-machine model of the mentioned classes.