Preface: Volume 16, Issue 3

Abstract

The HLCL workshops are intended to bring together researchers involved in the design, development, foundations, and applications of high-level concurrent programming languages and models.Programming models should be simple, practical, high-level, and well founded. These qualities allow rigorous language specifications and support both formal and informal reasoning about programs. For concurrent and distributed systems, research on programming models has driven the design of several recent programming languages, including Erlang, versions of ML, like CML, Facile, and Haskell, as well as languages explicitly designed for concurrency or distribution such as Obliq, Oz, Pict, and the Join-Calculus language. Although the motivations behind the design of these languages are diverse (ranging from the development of graphical user interfaces and multi-agent systems to constraint, real-time, and distributed programming), suitable foundations have turned out to be quite similar in style and technique, often based on variants of well-known calculi for mobile processes.The first HLCL Workshop was organized by Benjamin Pierce and Matthew Hennessy at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, UK, in October 1995. The second HLCL Workshop was organized by Martin Müller and Joachim Niehren at Dagstuhl, Germany, in January 1997, chaired by Kohei Honda, Martin Odersky, Benjamin Pierce, Gert Smolka, and Phil Wadler. For more information see the workshop homepage.In addition to the six contributed papers presented at the workshop, this collection contains an abstract of the invited talk by James E. White (General Magic, US). We would like to thank the authors of the submitted papers, the invited speaker, and the members of the program committee for their contribution to both the meeting and this volume. We also would like to thank BRICS for the printing and Michael Mislove for his help with the editing of the proceedings, ERCIM for financial support, the CONCUR organizing committee at INRIA for hosting HLCL'98, and Silvano Dal-Zilio for further local organization.