But a few computer scientists and mathematicians who also speak the language of physics are beginning to prepare for the inevitable handover to the programmers who make today's computers useful. A group based in Italy is among the latest researchers who are attempting to bridge the chasm between traditional programming tools and the inscrutable world of quantum mechanics. The researchers are building a programming architecture for quantum computing . The class library will contain basic building blocks for programming quantum computers, including registers, operators and instructions for manipulating quantum bits . Registers are slots where computer processors temporarily place numbers like values and addresses as they are working on them.
Operators are instructions for specific actions like addition and multiplication.
The researchers are not developing a new programming language specifically for quantum computers, but are building an extension to a standard classical computer programming language. The researchers' architecture is a hardware abstraction layer, which attempts to shield programmers from the details of a particular type of computer hardware so they can use the same tools to write software for different types of computers. Programming languages and their extensions are either interpreted or compiled. Software written in interpreted languages goes straight from the programmer to the computer, which uses a lot of resources converting the software to a more machine-friendly form. Software written in compiled languages is processed by another tool, a compiler , which does the conversion before the software is used on a computer.