This volume contains most of the papers presented at the workshop on research directions in high-level parallel programming languages, held at Mont Saint-Michel, France, in June 1991. The motivation for organizing this workshop came from the emergence of a new class of formalisms for describing parallel computations in the last few years. Linda, Unity, Gamma, and the Cham are the most significant representatives of this new class. Formalisms of this family promote simple but powerful language features for describing data and programs. These proposals appeared in different contexts and were applied in different domains, and the goal of the workshop was to review the status of this new field and compare experiences. The workshop was organized into four main sessions: Unity, Linda, Gamma, and Parallel Program Design. The corresponding parts ofthe volume are introduced respectively by J. Misra, D. Gelernter, D. Le Mtayer, and J.-P. Ban tre.
