Ladder functions in classical mechanics are defined in a similar way as ladder operators in the context of quantum mechanics. In the present paper, we develop a new method for obtaining ladder functions of one dimensional systems by means of a product of two 'factor functions'. We apply this method to the curved Kepler-Coulomb and Rosen-Morse II systems whose ladder functions were not found yet. The ladder functions here obtained are applied to get the motion of the system.

In quantum mechanics, ladder operators allow to connect the eigenstates of a system together. Ladder functions are algebraically analog objects defined in the framework of classical hamiltonian physics. For a class of exactly solvable one dimensional Hamiltonians, both the ladder operators and ladder functions take a simple form and there is a close similarity between them. In this work, we show how the analogy extends to the case of the Rosen-Morse Hamiltonian, for which the ladder functions have a more complicated structure. We compute a form for the ladder operators, based on the ladder functions of the system and we analyse the correspondences between both cases. Physical mean values are also obtained as a byproduct of the construction.