> 
>> Strangely enough, I don't recall ever seeing a *real* programming 
>> language, to be distinguished from academic ones, that ever handled 
>> parallelism in a manner other than as calls to run-time libraries. Ruby 
>> already has that.
>>


Perhapps have a look at Fortress from Sun Micro

http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/faq/index.html

"Fortress is designed to make parallel programming as painless as 
possible. Many of the core language constructs in Fortress, including 
function argument evaluation and ``for" loops, are parallel by default. 
Threads can synchronize using atomic code blocks. Fortress supplements 
this implicit fork-join threading model with explicit futures, and 
provides programmers with ways to control where particular threads are 
run and how large objects are laid out in memory."

--
Brad Phelan
http://xtargets.com