A Verified Cost Model for Call-By-Push-Value
Chen, Zhuo Zoey, Åman Pohjola, Johannes, Christine Rizkallah · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · 2025
The call-by-push-value λ-calculus allows for syntactically specifying the order of evaluation as part of the term language. Hence, it serves as a unifying language for embedding various evaluation strategies including call-by-value and call-by-name. Given the impact of call-by-push-value, it is remarkable that its adequacy as a model for computational complexity theory has not yet been studied. In this paper, we show that the call-by-push-value λ-calculus is reasonable for both time and space complexity. A reasonable cost model can encode other reasonable cost models with polynomial overhead in time and constant factor overhead in space. We achieve this by encoding call-by-push-value λ-calculus into Turing machines, following a simulation strategy by Forster et al.; for the converse direction, we prove that Levy’s encoding of the call-by-value λ-calculus has reasonable complexity bounds. The main results have been formalised in the HOL4 theorem prover.