We propose the higher-order functional style for the parallel programming of algorithms. The functional language [Formula: see text], a subset of the language Haskell, facilitates the clean integration of skeletons into a functional program. Skeletons are predefined programming schemata with an efficient parallel implementation. We report on our compiler, which translates [Formula: see text] programs into C+MPI, especially on the design decisions we made. Two small examples, the n queens problem and Karatsuba's polynomial multiplication, are presented to demonstrate the programming comfort and the speedup one can obtain.