Tetsuo Yokoyama, Robert Glück. A reversible programming language and its invertible self-interpreter. In Ganesan Ramalingam, Eelco Visser, editors, Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-based Program Manipulation, 2007, Nice, France, January 15-16, 2007. pages 144-153, ACM, 2007. [doi]
A reversible programming language supports deterministic forward and backward computation. We formalize the programming language Janus and prove its reversibility. We provide a program inverter for the language and implement a self-interpreter that achieves deterministic forward and backward interpretation of Janus programs without using a computation history. As the self-interpreter is implemented in a reversible language, it is invertible using local program inversion. Many physical phenomena are reversible and we demonstrate the power of Janus by implementing a reversible program for discrete simulation of the Schrödinger wave equation that can be inverted as well as run forward and backward.