What can be decided or semidecided about a primitive recursive function, given a definition of that function by primitive recursion? What about subrecursive classes other than primitive recursive functions? We provide a complete and explicit characterization of the decidable and semidecidable properties. This characterization uses a variant of Kolmogorov complexity where only programs in a subrecursive programming language are allowed. More precisely, we prove that all the decidable and semidecidable properties can be obtained as combinations of two classes of basic decidable properties: (i) the function takes some particular values on a finite set of inputs, and (ii) every finite part of the function can be compressed to some extent.