Higher-order Interpretations and Program Complexity (Long Version)

Patrick Baillot (1) , Ugo Dal Lago (2, 3)

1 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
2 DISI - Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione [Bologna]
3 FOCUS - Foundations of Component-based Ubiquitous Systems

Polynomial interpretations and their generalizations like quasi-interpretations have been used in the setting of first-order functional languages to design criteria ensuring statically some complexity bounds on programs. This fi ts in the area of implicit computational complexity, which aims at giving machine-free characterizations of complexity classes. Here we extend this approach to the higher-order setting. For that we consider the notion of simply typed term rewriting systems, we defi ne higher-order polynomial interpretations (HOPI) for them and give a criterion based on HOPIs to ensure that a program can be executed in polynomial time. In order to obtain a criterion which is flexible enough to validate some interesting programs using higher-order primitives, we introduce a notion of polynomial quasi-interpretations, coupled with a simple termination criterion based on linear types and path-like orders.

Mots clés: implicit computational complexity; rewrite systems; polynomial interpretations; quasi-interpretations; polynomial time complexity

Domaines: Logique en informatique [cs.LO]

Patrick Baillot, Ugo Dal Lago. Higher-order Interpretations and Program Complexity (Long Version). 2012. ⟨hal-00667816⟩