We investigate the power of non-determinism in purely functional programming
languages with higher-order types. Specifically, we consider cons-free programs
of varying data orders, equipped with explicit non-deterministic choice.
Cons-freeness roughly means that data constructors cannot occur in function
bodies and all manipulation of storage space thus has to happen indirectly
using the call stack.
While cons-free programs have previously been used by several authors to
characterise complexity classes, the work on non-deterministic programs has
almost exclusively considered programs of data order 0. Previous work has shown
that adding explicit non-determinism to cons-free programs taking data of order
0 does not increase expressivity; we prove that this - dramatically - is not
the case for higher data orders: adding non-determinism to programs with data
order at least 1 allows for a characterisation of the entire class of
elementary-time decidable sets.
Finally we show how, even with non-deterministic choice, the original
hierarchy of characterisations is restored by imposing different restrictions.Comment: pre-edition version of a paper accepted for publication at ESOP'1
