Title
Adventures in time and space
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2006
Journal or Book Title
POPL '06: Conference Record of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages
First Page
168
Last Page
179
Abstract
This paper investigates what is essentially a call-by-value version of PCF under a complexity-theoretically motivated type system. The programming formalism, ATR1, has its first-order programs characterize the poly-time computable functions, and its second-order programs characterize the type-2 basic feasible functionals of Mehlhorn and of Cook and Urquhart. (The ATR1-types are confined to levels 0, 1, and 2.) The type system comes in two parts, one that primarily restricts the sizes of values of expressions and a second that primarily restricts the time required to evaluate expressions. The size-restricted part is motivated by Bellantoni and Cook's and Leivant's implicit characterizations of poly-time. The time-restricting part is an affine version of Barber and Plotkin's DILL. Two semantics are constructed for ATR1. The first is a pruning of the naïve denotational semantics for ATR1. This pruning removes certain functions that cause otherwise feasible forms of recursion to go wrong. The second semantics is a model for ATR1's time complexity relative to a certain abstract machine. This model provides a setting for complexity recurrences arising from ATR1 recursions, the solutions of which yield second-order polynomial time bounds. The time-complexity semantics is also shown to be sound relative to the costs of interpretation on the abstract machine.
Recommended Citation
Norman Danner and James S. Royer. Adventures in time and space. In POPL ’06: Conference Record of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (Charleston, SC, 2006), pages 168–179, 2006. doi: 10.1145/1111037.1111053.