Subrecursive Programming Languages, Part I
Robert L. Constable, Allan Borodin · Journal of the ACM · 1972
The structural complexity of programming languages, and therefore of programs as well, can be measured by the subrecursive class of functions which characterize the language.Using such a measure of structural complexity, we examine the trade-off relationship between structural and computational complexity.Since measures of structural complexity directly related to high level languages interest us most, we use abstract language models which approximate highly structured languages like Algol.