This book is a collection of papers presented at the first annual Workshop held under the auspices of the ESPRIT Basic Research Action 3245, “Logical Frameworks: Design, Implementation and Experiment”. It took place at Sophia-Antipolis, France from the 7th to the 11th of May, 1990. Seventy-four people attended the Workshop: one from Japan, six from the United States, and the rest from Europe.

We thank the European Community for the funding which made the Workshop possible. We also thank Gilles Kahn who, with the help of the Service des Relations Extérieures of INRIA, performed a most excellent job of organisation. Finally, we thank the following researchers who acted as referees: R. Constable, T. Coquand, N.G. deBruijn, P. de Groote, V. Donzeau-Gouge, G. Dowek, P. Dybjer, A. Felty, L. Hallnäs, R. Harper, L. Helmink, F. Honsell, Z. Luo, N. Mendler, C. Paulin, L. Paulson, R. Pollack, D. Pym, F. Rouaix, P. Schröder-Heister, A. Smaill, and B. Werner.

We cannot resist saying a word or two about how these proceedings came into being. Immediately after the Workshop, participants were invited to contribute papers by electronic mail, as LATEX sources. One of us (Huet) then collected the papers together, largely unedited, and the result was “published electronically” by making the collection a file available worldwide by ftp (a remote file transfer protocol). This seems to have been somewhat of a success, at least in terms of numbers of copies circulated, and perhaps had merit in terms of rapid and widespread availability of recent work.