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A Theory of Termination via Indirection Dockins, Robert Hobor, Aquinas Step-indexed Models Termination Step-indexed models provide approximations to a class of domain equations and can prove type safety, partial correctness, and program equivalence; however, a common misconception is that they are inapplicable to liveness problems. We disprove this by applying step-indexing to develop the first Hoare logic of total correctness for a language with function pointers and semantic assertions. In fact, from a liveness perspective, our logic is stronger: we verify explicit time resource bounds. We apply our logic to examples containing nontrivial "higher-order" uses of function pointers and we prove soundness with respect to a standard operational semantics. Our core technique is very compact and may be applicable to other liveness problems. Our results are machine checked in Coq. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Robert Dockins and Aquinas Hobor 2010 Is Part Of Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, Volume 10351, Modelling, Controlling and Reasoning About State (2010) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/DagSemProc.10351.3 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-28050 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagSemProc.10351.3 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode