Fortress is a very intriguing language. I eagerly await its completion. For example, in Fortress, tuples -- including function argument lists -- can be built/executed in parallel. There is a nice parallel block statement do ... also do ... also do ... end; Check out more at the fortress project site. If you do download the Fortress project to try at home, please be aware that (at the time of this article's publication), the language and runtime are still under development. In particular, the runtime is still all interpreted and therefore is fairly slow - certainly not comparable with Fortran... yet. If you explore Fortress and learn more, please contribute to the Fortress wiki at http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/wiki , so others can benefit from what you learn. The folks on the fortress mailing list (see the project home page for links) are also very responsive and helpful. »