  A successive cancellation (SC) decoder with inactivations is proposed as an
efficient implementation of SC list (SCL) decoding over the binary erasure
channel. The proposed decoder assigns a dummy variable to an information bit
whenever it is erased during SC decoding and continues with decoding.
Inactivated bits are resolved using information gathered from decoding frozen
bits. This decoder leverages the structure of the Hadamard matrix, but can be
applied to any linear code by representing it as a polar code with dynamic
frozen bits. SCL decoders are partially characterized using density evolution
to compute the average number of inactivations required to achieve the maximum
a-posteriori decoding performance. The proposed measure quantifies the
performance vs. complexity trade-off and provides new insight into dynamics of
the number of paths in SCL decoding. The technique is applied to analyze
Reed-Muller (RM) codes with dynamic frozen bits. It is shown that these
modified RM codes perform close to extended BCH codes.
