Abstract. We present and motivate the definition and use of the language and environment dSL, an imperative and event driven language designed to program distributed industrial control systems. dSL provides transparent code distribution using simple mechanisms. Its use allows the industrial control system’s designer to concentrate on the sequences of control required; the dSL compiler-distributer taking into account the distribution aspects. We show the advantages of our approach compared to others proposed using e.g. shared memory or synchronous languages like Esterel, Lustre or Signal.