Abstract : A software development framework for parallel processing systems based on the parallel object-oriented functional computation model PROOF is evaluated. PROOF/L, a C++ based programming language with additional parallel constructs required by PROOF, is extended to include array data type and input/output features to make PROOFIL easier to use in developing software for parallel processing systems. The front-end translator from PROOF/L to the intermediate form IFl, and the back-end translators from IFl to the C languages on two different MIMD parallel machines, nCube and KSR, are developed. Our framework is evaluated by comparing it with existing software development approaches for parallel processing systems. Our framework is suitable for large-scale parallel software development because it supports the concepts of hierarchical design and shared data, and frees the software developer from considering explicit synchronization, communication, and parallelism. The software development efforts using our framework can be greatly reduced due to implicit synchronization and communication and the compactness of PROOF/L programs. The extension of PROOF/L and the integration of PROOF/L with other programming languages to utilize existing library functions written in languages such as C and FORTRAN are also discussed.