OpenQASM

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Open Quantum Assembly Language (OpenQASM; pronounced open kazm^[1]) is a programming language designed for describing quantum circuits and algorithms for execution on quantum computers. It is designed to be an intermediate representation that can be used by higher-level compilers to communicate with quantum hardware, and allows for the description of a wide range of quantum operations, as well as classical feed-forward flow control based on measurement outcomes.

The language includes a mechanism for describing explicit timing of instructions, and allows for the attachment of low-level definitions to gates for tasks such as calibration.^[1] OpenQASM is not intended for general-purpose classical computation, and hardware implementations of the language may not support the full range of data manipulation described in the specification. Compilers for OpenQASM are expected to support a wide range of classical operations for compile-time constants, but the support for these operations on runtime values may vary between implementations.^[2]

The language was first described in a paper published in July 2017,^[1] and a reference source code implementation was released as part of IBM's Quantum Information Software Kit (Qiskit) for use with their IBM Quantum Experience cloud quantum computing platform.^[3] The language has similar qualities to traditional hardware description languages such as Verilog.

OpenQASM defines its version at the head of a source file as a number, as in the declaration:

OPENQASM 3;

The level of OpenQASM's original published implementations is OpenQASM 2.0. Version 3.0 of the specification is the current one and can be viewed at the OpenQASM repository on GitHub.