Re 3: I don't think anything like this exists yet (as you've described close to the "holy grail" of numerical languages ;-) ), but you might want to check out J

Re 3: I don't think anything like this exists yet (as you've described close to the "holy grail" of numerical languages ;-) ), but you might want to check out Julia[1] if you haven't done so yet. It doesn't do everything you want, but has decently good performance, makes it easy to call C libs (and Fortran I think), and is doing some interesting things with parallelization. Unfortunately it doesn't yet have MPI support, the performance you want, etc. but it's a very new language with an active community, and I think it has goals compatible to yours. Re 1: As yolesaber said, most decent IDEs/editors should give you tools to deal with parens. As for pretty-printing equations: I used to have a Perl script that would convert code to LaTeX according to certain rules, but it's lost in a previous job's IP. Still, this should be reasonably achievable with a set of regexs + LaTeX assuming you use a consistent syntax throughout for your equations, without too many ambiguous cases. :) [1] http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/