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paper: towards a quantum programming language
Dear Type Theorists,
my new paper, "Towards a Quantum Programming Language", is available
from my web site. In it, I describe a programming language for quantum
computation. Unlike other such languages appearing in the literature,
this one has a static type system which guarantees the absense of
run-time errors. It can handle recursive types, but not higher-order
types (yet).
The paper is self-contained and does not presuppose any knowledge of
quantum physics. As usual, comments are welcome.
-- Peter Selinger
http://quasar.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~selinger/papers.html
Abstract: The field of quantum computation suffers from a lack of
syntax. In the absence of a convenient programming language,
algorithms are frequently expressed in terms of hardware circuits or
Turing machines. Neither approach particularly encourages structured
programming or abstractions such as data types. In this paper, we
describe the syntax and semantics of a simple quantum programming
language. This language provides high-level features such as loops,
recursive procedures, and structured data types. It is statically
typed, and it has an interesting denotational semantics in terms of
complete partial orders of superoperators.