Abstract

A reversible abstract machine architecture and its reversible machine code are presented and formalized. For machine code to be reversible, both the underlying control logic and each instruction must be reversible. A general class of machine instruction sets is proven to be reversible, building on our concept of reversible updates. The presentation is abstract and can serve as a guideline for a family of reversible processor designs. By example, we illustrate programming principles for the reversible abstract machine architecture formalized in this work.