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. 1

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