Denotational semantics as a foundation for cost recurrence extraction for functional languages
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A standard method for analyzing the asymptotic complexity of a program is to extract a recurrence that describes its cost in terms of the size of its input, and then to compute a closed-form upper bound on that recurrence. In practice there is rarely a formal argument that the recurrence is in fact an upper bound; indeed, there is usually no formal connection between the program and the recurrence at all. Here we develop a method for extracting recurrences from functional programs in a higher-order language with let-polymorphism that provably bound their operational cost. The method consists of two phases. In the first phase, a monadic translation is performed to extract a cost-annotated version of the original program. In the second phase, the extracted program is interpreted in a model. The key feature of this second phase is that different models describe different notions of size. This plays out specifically for values of inductive type, where different notions of size may be appropriate depending on the analysis, and for polymorphic functions, where we show that the notion of size for a polymorphic function can be described formally as the data that is common to the notions of size of its instances. We give several examples of different models that formally justify various informal extract-a-recurrence-and-solve cost analyses to show the applicability of our approach.
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