This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the fifth European Symposium on Programming (ESOP '94), which was held jointly with the 19th Colloquium on Trees in Algebra and Programming (CAAP '94) in Edinburgh in April 1994. ESOP is devoted to fundamental issues in the specification, design and implementation of programming languages and systems. The scope of the symposium includes work on: software analysis, specification, transformation, development and verification/certification; programming paradigms (functional, logic, object-oriented, concurrent, etc.) and their combinations; programming language concepts, implementation techniques and semantics; software design methodologies; typing disciplines and typechecking algorithms; and programming support tools.