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In 2001 Lee, Jones and Ben-Amram introduced the notion of size-change termination (SCT) for first order functional programs, a sufficient condition for termination. They proved that a program is size-change terminating if and only if it has a certain property which can be statically verified from the recursive definition of the program. Their proof of the size-change termination theorem used Ramsey's Theorem for pairs, which is a purely classical result. In 2012 Vytiniotis, Coquand and Wahlsteldt intuitionistically proved a classical variant of the size-change termination theorem by using the Almost-Full Theorem instead of Ramsey's Theorem for pairs. In this paper we provide an intuitionistic proof of another classical variant of the SCT theorem: our goal is to provide a statement and a proof very similar to the original ones. This can be done by using the H-closure Theorem, which differs from Ramsey's Theorem for pairs only by a contrapositive step. As a side result we obtain another proof of the characterization of the functions computed by a tail-recursive SCT program, by relating the SCT Theorem with the Termination Theorem by Podelski and Rybalchenko. Finally, by investigating the relationship between them, we provide a property in the "language" of size-change termination which is equivalent to Podelski and Rybalchenko's termination.
@InProceedings{steila:LIPIcs.TYPES.2014.288,
author = {Steila, Silvia},
title = {{An Intuitionistic Analysis of Size-change Termination}},
booktitle = {20th International Conference on Types for Proofs and Programs (TYPES 2014)},
pages = {288--307},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-939897-88-0},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2015},
volume = {39},
editor = {Herbelin, Hugo and Letouzey, Pierre and Sozeau, Matthieu},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.TYPES.2014.288},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-55026},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.TYPES.2014.288},
annote = {Keywords: Intuitionism, Ramsey's Theorem, Termination}
}