A Procedural Formalism for Quantum Computing

Despite many common concepts with classical computer science, quantum computing is still widely considered as a special discipline within the broad field of theoretical physics. One reason for the slow adoption of QC by the computer science community is the confusing variety of formalisms (Dirac notation, matrices, gates, operators, etc.), none of which has any similarity with classical programming languages, as well as the rather “physical” terminology in most of the available literature. QCL (Quantum Computation Language) tries to fill this gap: QCL is a hight level, architecture independent programming language for quantum computers, with a syntax derived from classical procedural languages like C or Pascal. This allows for the complete implementation and simulation of quantum algorithms (including classical components) in one consistent formalism. Chapter 1 is an introduction into the basic concepts of quantum programming, a complete language reference of QCL can be found in chapter 2 and chapter 3 gives some examples including the QCL implementation of Shor’s factorisation algorithm. The sourcecode of the QCL interpreter is available at http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/qcl.html.