Basing on an original Coq implementation of unbounded linear search for partially decidable predicates, we study the computational contents of ?-recursive functions via their syntactic representation, and a correct by construction Coq interpreter for this abstract syntax. When this interpreter is extracted, we claim the resulting OCaml code to be the natural combination of the implementation of the ?-recursive schemes of composition, primitive recursion and unbounded minimization of partial (i.e., possibly non-terminating) functions. At the level of the fully specified Coq terms, this implies the representation of higher-order functions of which some of the arguments are themselves partial functions. We handle this issue using some techniqu...