A classification of Baire-1 functions

In this paper we give some topological characterizations of
bounded Baire-1 functions using some ranks. Kechris and Louveau classified the Baire-1 functions to the subclasses for every (where is a compact metric space). The first basic result of this paper is that for , iff there exists a sequence of differences of bounded semicontinuous functions on with pointwise and (where ``' denotes the convergence rank). This extends the work of Kechris and Louveau who obtained this result for . We also show that the result fails for . The second basic result of the paper involves the introduction of a new ordinal-rank on sequences , called the -rank, which is smaller than the convergence rank . This result yields the following characterization of iff there exists a sequence of continuous functions with pointwise and if , resp. if .