A Characterization of NC by First Order Functional Programs

This paper is part of a research on static analysis in order to predict program resources and belongs to the implicit computational complexity line of research. It presents intrinsic characterizations of the classes of functions, which are computable in NC, that is by a uniform, poly-logarithmic depth and polynomial size family of circuits, using first order functional programs. Our characterizations are new in terms of first order functional programming language and extend the characterization of NC in [9]. These characterizations are obtained using a complexity measure, the sup-interpretation, which gives upper bounds on the size of computed values and captures a lot of program schemas.