A Linear-Time Self-Interpreter of a Reversible Imperative Language

Abstract

A linear-time reversible self-interpreter in an r-Turing complete reversible imperative language is presented. The proposed imperative language has reversible structured control ow operators and symbolic tree-structured data (S-expressions). The latter data structures are dynamically allocated and enable reversible simulation of programs of arbitrary size and space consumption. As self-interpreters are used to show a number of fundamental properties in classic computability and complexity theory, the present study of an efficient reversible self-interpreter is intended as a basis for future work on reversible computability and complexity theory as well as programming language theory for reversible computing. Although the proposed reversible interpreter consumes superlinear space, the restriction of the number of variables in the source language leads to linear-time reversible simulation.