[TYPES/announce] Quipper: a quantum programming language

[Peter Selinger]

Dear Type Theorists,

we are proud to announce the first public release of Quipper, an
embedded, scalable functional programming language for quantum
computing. The Quipper distribution is available here:

http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/quipper/

and includes extensive documentation, as well as seven worked examples
of non-trivial quantum algorithms from the literature.

Quipper is embedded in Haskell and makes use of many advanced features
of the GHC Glasgow Haskell Compiler. Here are some highlights:

* High-level circuit description language, including both gate-by-gate
  descriptions and powerful higher-order operators for assembling and
  manipulating circuits.

* A monadic semantics, allowing for a mixture of procedural and
  declarative programming styles.

* Built-in facilities for automatic synthesis of reversible quantum
  circuits, including from classical Haskell code.

* Support for hierarchical circuits.

* Extensible quantum data types.

* Support for a dynamic lifting operation to allow circuit generation
  to depend on parameters generated at circuit execution time.

* Extensive libraries of quantum functions, including: libraries for
  quantum integer and fixed-point arithmetic; the Quantum Fourier
  transform; an efficient quantum random access memory implementation;
  libraries for simulation of pseudo-classical circuits, Stabilizer
  circuits, and arbitrary circuits; libraries for exact and
  approximate decomposition of circuits into specific gate sets.

Comments are welcome!

Alexander S. Green
Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine
Neil Julien Ross
Peter Selinger
Benoit Valiron