Theory of higher order interpretations and application to Basic Feasible Functions

01/25/2018

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by   Emmanuel Hainry, et al.

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Interpretation methods and their restrictions to polynomials have been deeply used to control the termination and complexity of first-order term rewrite systems. This paper extends interpretation methods to a pure higher order functional language. We develop a theory of higher order functions that is well-suited for the complexity analysis of this programming language. The interpretation domain is a complete lattice and, consequently, we express program interpretation in terms of a least fixpoint. As an application, by bounding interpretations by higher order polynomials, we characterize Basic Feasible Functions at any order.