On Dynamic Lifting and Effect Typing in Circuit Description Languages (Extended Version)

Abstract

In the realm of quantum computing, circuit description languages represent a valid alternative to traditional QRAM-style languages. They indeed allow for finer control over the output circuit, without sacrificing flexibility nor modularity. We introduce a generalization of the paradigmatic lambda-calculus Proto-Quipper-M, itself modeling the core features of the quantum circuit description language Quipper. The extension, called Proto-Quipper-K, is meant to capture a very general form of dynamic lifting. This is made possible by the introduction of a rich type and effect system in which not only computations, but also the very types are effectful. The main results we give for the introduced language are the classic type soundness results, namely subject reduction and progress.