Toward an architecture for quantum programming

This paper investigates a novel approach to the problem of programming mixed classical/quantum computing machines. A general discussion about quantum programming issues, models and hardware requirements is followed by the first step of this work plan, namely a template high level quantum language which complements a generic general purpose classical language with a set of quantum primitives. The proposed implementation scheme involves a run time interpreter byte-coding the quantum operations and piping them to a quantum device controller (or a simulator of some sort). We claim that the proposed language can compactly express existing quantum algorithms and believe that it can facilitate the design of future ones. Moreover, the general scheme provides hooks for optimization modules both dependent on and independent from the underlying quantum device