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.