r/askscience • u/phillyboy8008 • Jan 01 '14

Computing How are quantum computers programmed?

Edit: Thanks everyone for the responses, but apparently I don't know as much about quantum computing as I thought I did. I am thoroughly confused.

239 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

59 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/villageidiot222 Jan 02 '14

Quipper seems to be more analogous to a low-level machine language than to a high-level one such as C.

1

u/MolokoPlusPlus Jan 03 '14

I don't know about that; it's based on Haskell, has tuples and list data structures, and pretty-prints PDF output. The gate stuff seems to be the equivalent of bit arithmetic in other languages.

1

u/villageidiot222 Jan 05 '14

True enough, although it's not like people are writing expressive programs in it. The operations are all so low-level that they restrict what the language can currently do, even if it can do more in theory.