Collected Size Semantics for Functional Programs over Lists

This work introduces collected size semantics of strict functional programs over lists. The collected size semantics of a function definition is a multivalued size function that collects the dependencies between every possible output size and the corresponding input sizes. Such functions annotate standard types and are defined by conditional rewriting rules generated during type inference. We focus on the connection between the rewriting rules and lower and upper bounds on the multivalued size functions, when the bounds are given by piecewise polynomials. We show how, given a set of conditional rewriting rules, one can infer bounds that define an indexed family of polynomials that approximates the multivalued size function. Using collected size semantics we are able to infer non-monotonic and non-linear lower and upper polynomial bounds for many functional programs. As a feasibility study, we use the procedure to infer lower and upper polynomial size-bounds on typical functions of a list library.