This book presents the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Parallel Symbolic Languages and Systems, PSLS '95, held in Beaune, France, in October 1995.
The 21 full papers included in the book were carefully selected for presentation at the meeting and thoroughly revised afterwards. Parallel symbolic computing has gained in importance for high-performance computing; in recent years, many applications have been implemented using C, C++, and their parallel extensions. This volume is organized in sections on evaluation strategies, programming tools, irregular data structures and applications, systems, and distributed models and systems.

Parallel and distributed computing are becoming increasingly important as cost-effective ways to achieve high computational performance. Symbolic computations are notable for their use of irregular data structures and hence parallel symbolic computing has its own distinctive set of technical challenges. The papers in this book are based on presentations made at a workshop at MIT in October 1992. They present results in a wide range of areas including: speculative computation, scheduling techniques, program development tools and environments, programming languages and systems, models of concurrency and distribution, parallel computer architecture, and symbolic applications.

This volume presents the proceedings of a workshop at which major Parallel Lisp activities in the US and Japan were explained. Work covered includes Multilisp and Mul-T at MIT, Qlisp at Stanford, Lucid and Parcel at Illinois, PaiLisp at Tohoku University, Multiprocessor Lisp on TOP-1 at IBM Tokyo Research, and concurrent programming in TAO. Most papers present languages and systems of Parallel Lisp and are in particular concerned with: - Language constructs of Parallel Lisp and their meanings from the standpoint of implementing Parallel Lisp systems; - Some important technical issues such as parallel garbage collection, dynamic task partitioning, futures and continuations in parallelism, automatic parallelization of Lisp programs, and the kernel concept of Parallel Lisp. Some performance results are reported that suggest practical applicability of Parallel Lisp systems in the near future. Several papers on concurrent object-oriented systems are also included.