The field of quantum programming languages is developing rapidly and there is a surprisingly large literature. Research in this area includes the design of programming languages for quantum computing, the application of established semantic and logical techniques to the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the design of compilers for quantum programming languages. This article justifies the study of quantum programming languages, presents the basics of quantum computing, surveys the literature in quantum programming languages, and indicates directions for future research.

High-level replacement systems are formulated in an axiomatic algebraic framework based on categories pushouts. This approach generalizes the well-known algebraic approach to graph grammars and several other types of replacement systems, especially the replacement of algebraic specifications which was recently introduced for a rule-based approach to modular system design.

in this paper basic notions like productions, derivations, parellel and sequential independence are introduced for high-level replacement syetms leading to Church-Rosser, Parallelism and concurrency Theorems previously shown in the literature for special cases only. In the general case of high-level replacement systems specific conditions, called HLR1- and HLR2-conditions, are formulated in order to obtain these results.

Several examples of high-level replacement systems are discussed and classified w.r.t. HLR1- and HLR2-conditions showing which of the results are valid in each case.

The subject of linear logic has recently become very important in theoretical computer science. It is apparent that the *-autonomous categories studied at length in by Barr (1979) are a model for a large fragment of linear logic, although not quite for the whole thing. Since the main reference is out of print and since large parts of that volume are devoted to results highly peripheral to the matter at hand, it seemed reasonable to provide a short introduction to the subject.

In this paper we develop a functional programming language for quantum computers by extending the simply-typed lambda calculus with quantum types and operations. The design of this language adheres to the ‘quantum data, classical control’ paradigm, following the first author's work on quantum flow-charts. We define a call-by-value operational semantics, and give a type system using affine intuitionistic linear logic. The main results of this paper are the safety properties of the language and the development of a type inference algorithm.

We present an axiomatic framework for Girard's Geometry of Interaction based on the notion of linear combinatory algebra. We give a general construction on traced monoidal categories, with certain additional structure, that is sufficient to capture the exponentials of Linear Logic, which produces such algebras (and hence also ordinary combinatory algebras). We illustrate the construction on six standard examples, representing both the ‘particle-style’ as well as the ‘wave-style’ Geometry of Interaction.

We investigate the computing power of a restricted class of DNA strand displacement structures: those that are made of double strands with nicks (interruptions) in the top strand. To preserve this structural invariant, we impose restrictions on the single strands they interact with: we consider only two-domain single strands consisting of one toehold domain and one recognition domain. We study fork and join signal processing gates based on these structures, and show that these systems are amenable to formalisation and mechanical verification.

We study the combination of probability and non-determinism from a categorical point of view. In category theory, non-determinism and probability are represented by suitable monads. However, these two monads do not combine well as they are. To overcome this problem, we introduce the notion of indexed valuations. This notion is used to define a new monad that can be combined with the usual non-deterministic monad via a categorical distributive law. We give an equational characterisation of our construction. We discuss the computational meaning of indexed valuations, and we show how they can be used by giving a denotational semantics of a simple imperative language.

Information flow policies are confidentiality policies that control information leakage through program execution. A common way to enforce secure information flow is through information flow type systems. Although type systems are compositional and usually enjoy decidable type checking or inference, their extensibility is very poor: type systems need to be redefined and proved sound for each new variation of security policy and programming language for which secure information flow verification is desired.

In contrast, program logics offer a general mechanism for enforcing a variety of safety policies, and for this reason are favoured in Proof Carrying Code, which is a promising security architecture for mobile code. However, the encoding of information flow policies in program logics is not straightforward because they refer to a relation between two program executions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate logical formulations of secure information flow based on the idea of self-composition, which reduces the problem of secure information flow of a program P to a safety property for a program derived from P by composing P with a renaming of itself. Self-composition enables the use of standard techniques for information flow policy verification, such as program logics and model checking, that are suitable in Proof Carrying Code infrastructures.

We illustrate the applicability of self-composition in several settings, including different security policies such as non-interference and controlled forms of declassification, and programming languages including an imperative language with parallel composition, a non-deterministic language and, finally, a language with shared mutable data structures.

It is well known that every algorithmic problem definable by a formula of first-order logic can be solved in polynomial time, since all these problems are in L (see Aho and Ullman (1979) and Immerman (1987)). Using an old technique of Hanf (Hanf 1965) and other techniques developed to prove the decidability of formal theories in mathematical logic, it is shown that an arbitrary FO-problem over relational structures of bounded degree can be solved in linear time.

This paper shows that it is precisely the complete metrizable separable metric spaces that can be realized as the set of maximal points of an ω-continuous dcpo, where the set of maximal points is topologized with the relative Scott topology.

Graph pattern matching is a central problem in many application fields. Since it is NP-complete, we cannot expect to find algorithms with a good worst-case performance. However, there is still room for general procedures with a good average performance. In this paper we explore four different solving approaches within the constraint satisfaction framework, and introduce a new algorithm, which we call nRF+. The algorithm is a refinement of really full look ahead that takes advantage of the problem structure in order to enhance the look ahead procedure. We give a formal proof that nRF+ is superior to the other approaches in terms of number of visited nodes. An additional contribution of this paper is the introduction of a new benchmark for testing algorithms in this domain. It is formed by a large set of well-defined graphs of very diverse nature. In this benchmark, we show that nRF+ can efficiently solve a broad range of problems, while still leaving many problem instances unsolved. The use of this challenging benchmark is encouraged for future algorithms evaluation.

We develop a notion of predicate transformer and, in particular, the weakest precondition, appropriate for quantum computation. We show that there is a Stone-type duality between the usual state-transformer semantics and the weakest precondition semantics. Rather than trying to reduce quantum computation to probabilistic programming, we develop a notion that is directly taken from concepts used in quantum computation. The proof that weakest preconditions exist for completely positive maps follows immediately from the Kraus representation theorem. As an example, we give the semantics of Selinger's language in terms of our weakest preconditions. We also cover some specific situations and exhibit an interesting link with stabilisers.

We investigate a new denotational model of linear logic based on the purely relational model. In this semantics, webs are equipped with a notion of ‘finitary’ subsets satisfying a closure condition and proofs are interpreted as finitary sets. In spite of a formal similarity, this model is quite different from the usual models of linear logic (coherence semantics, hypercoherence semantics, the various existing game semantics…). In particular, the standard fix-point operators used for defining the general recursive functions are not finitary, although the primitive recursion operators are. This model can be considered as a discrete analogue of the Köthe space semantics introduced in a previous paper: we show how, given a field, each finiteness space gives rise to a vector space endowed with a linear topology, a notion introduced by Lefschetz in 1942, and we study the corresponding model where morphisms are linear continuous maps (a version of Girard's quantitative semantics with coefficients in the field). In this way we obtain a new model of the recently introduced differential lambda-calculus.

A subtyping relation ≤ between types is often accompanied by a typing rule, called subsumption: if a term a has type T and T≤U, then a has type U. In presence of subsumption, a well-typed term does not codify its proof of well typing. Since a semantic interpretation is most naturally defined by induction on the structure of typing proofs, a problem of coherence arises: different typing proofs of the same term must have related meanings. We propose a proof-theoretical, rewriting approach to this problem. We focus on F≤, a second-order lambda calculus with bounded quantification, which is rich enough to make the problem interesting. We define a normalizing rewriting system on proofs, which transforms different proofs of the same typing judgement into a unique normal proof, with the further property that all the normal proofs assigning different types to a given term in a given environment differ only by a final application of the subsumption rule. This rewriting system is not defined on the proofs themselves but on the terms of an auxiliary type system, in which the terms carry complete information about their typing proof. This technique gives us three different results:

— Any semantic interpretation is coherent if and only if our rewriting rules are satisfied as equations.

— We obtain a proof of the existence of a minimum type for each term in a given environment.

— From an analysis of the shape of normal form proofs, we obtain a deterministic typechecking algorithm, which is sound and complete by construction.

Throughout the years, several typing disciplines for the π-calculus have been proposed. Arguably, the most widespread of these typing disciplines consists of session types. Session types describe the input/output behaviour of processes and traditionally provide strong guarantees about this behaviour (i.e. deadlock-freedom and fidelity). While these systems exploit a fundamental notion of linearity, the precise connection between linear logic and session types has not been well understood.

This paper proposes a type system for the π-calculus that corresponds to a standard sequent calculus presentation of intuitionistic linear logic, interpreting linear propositions as session types and thus providing a purely logical account of all key features and properties of session types. We show the deep correspondence between linear logic and session types by exhibiting a tight operational correspondence between cut-elimination steps and process reductions. We also discuss an alternative presentation of linear session types based on classical linear logic, and compare our development with other more traditional session type systems.

We develop a coinductive calculus of streams based on the presence of a final coalgebra structure on the set of streams (infinite sequences of real numbers). The main ingredient is the notion of stream derivative, which can be used to formulate both coinductive proofs and definitions. In close analogy to classical analysis, the latter are presented as behavioural differential equations. A number of applications of the calculus are presented, including difference equations, analytical differential equations, continued fractions, and some problems from discrete mathematics and combinatorics.

We present two type systems for term graph rewriting: conventional typing and (polymorphic) uniqueness typing. The latter is introduced as a natural extension of simple algebraic and higher-order uniqueness typing. The systems are given in natural deduction style using an inductive syntax of graph denotations with familiar constructs such as let and case.

The conventional system resembles traditional Curry-style typing systems in functional programming languages. Uniqueness typing extends this with reference count information. In both type systems, typing is preserved during evaluation, and types can be determined effectively. Moreover, with respect to a graph rewriting semantics, both type systems turn out to be sound.

In this paper we investigate and compare four variants of the double-pushout approach to graph transformation. As well as the traditional approach with arbitrary matching and injective right-hand morphisms, we consider three variations by employing injective matching and/or arbitrary right-hand morphisms in rules. We show that injective matching provides additional expressiveness in two respects: for generating graph languages by grammars without non-terminals and for computing graph functions by convergent graph transformation systems. Then we clarify for each of the three variations whether the well-known commutativity, parallelism and concurrency theorems are still valid and – where this is not the case – give modified results. In particular, for the most general approach with injective matching and arbitrary right-hand morphisms, we establish sequential and parallel commutativity by appropriately strengthening sequential and parallel independence.

Given a partial metric space (X, p), we use (BX, ⊑dp) to denote the poset of formal balls of the associated quasi-metric space (X, dp). We obtain characterisations of complete partial metric spaces and sup-separable complete partial metric spaces in terms of domain-theoretic properties of (BX, ⊑dp). In particular, we prove that a partial metric space (X, p) is complete if and only if the poset (BX, ⊑dp) is a domain. Furthermore, for any complete partial metric space (X, p), we construct a Smyth complete quasi-metric q on BX that extends the quasi-metric dp such that both the Scott topology and the partial order ⊑dp are induced by q. This is done using the partial quasi-metric concept recently introduced and discussed by H. P. Künzi, H. Pajoohesh and M. P. Schellekens (Künzi et al. 2006). Our approach, which is inspired by methods due to A. Edalat and R. Heckmann (Edalat and Heckmann 1998), generalises to partial metric spaces the constructions given by R. Heckmann (Heckmann 1999) and J. J. M. M. Rutten (Rutten 1998) for metric spaces.

A multiparty session forms a unit of structured communication among many participants which follow communication sequences specified as a global type. When a process is engaged in two or more sessions simultaneously, different sessions can be interleaved and can interfere at runtime. Previous work on multiparty session types has ignored session interleaving, providing a limited progress property ensured only within a single session, by assuming non-interference among different sessions and by forbidding delegation. This paper develops, besides a more traditional, compositional communication type system, a novel static interaction type system for global progress in dynamically interleaved and interfered multiparty sessions. The interaction type system infers causalities of channels making sure that processes do not get stuck at intermediate stages of sessions also in presence of delegation.