A comparison of well-quasi orders on trees

Abstract

Well-quasi orders such as homeomorphic embedding are commonly used to ensure termination of program analysis and program transformation, in particular supercompilation. We compare eight well-quasi orders on how discriminative they are and their computational complexity. The studied well-quasi orders comprise two very simple examples, two examples from literature on supercompilation and four new proposed by the author. We also discuss combining several well-quasi orders to get well-quasi orders of higher discriminative power. This adds 19 more well-quasi orders to the list.