Stephen A. Cook and Bruce M. Kapron Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 1 Introduction Functionals are functions which take natural numbers and other functionals as arguments and return natural numbers as values. The class of "feasible" functionals of finite type was introduced in [6] via the typed lambda calculus, and used to interpret certain formal systems of arithmetic: systems capturing the notion of "feasibly constructive proof" (we equate feasibility with polynomial time computability) . Here we name the functionals of [6] the basic feasible functionals and justify the designation by presenting results which include two programming style characterizations of the class. We also give examples of both feasible and infeasible functionals, and argue that the notion plays a natural role in complexity theory. Type 2 functionals take numbers and ordinary numerical functions as arguments. When these argument functions are 0-1 valued (i.e. sets) ...