A predicative and decidable characterization of the polynomial classes of languages☆

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Abstract

Characterizations of PTIME, PSPACE, the polynomial hierarchy and its elements are given, which are decidable (membership can be decided by syntactic inspection to the constructions), predicative (according to points of view by Leivant and others), and are obtained by means of increasing restrictions to course-of-values recursion on trees (represented in a dialect of Lisp).

Keywords

Computational complexity
Predicative recursion
Functional programming
Lisp

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☆

The second and third co-authors mainly contributed to this paper when they were post-graduate students at Bari, with the financial support of Dip. d’ Informatica and of the Italian MURST “funds 60%”.

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