THOMAS W. CHRISTOPHER and GEORGE K. THIRUVATHUKAL are principals in Tools of Computing LLC, a Chicago-area consulting firm specializing in high-performance computing and object-oriented languages. A professor of Computer Science for over twenty years, Christopher has written several compilers. Thiruvathukal, a former computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratories, is now a visiting professor at Loyola University in Chicago and Secretary General of the Java Grande Group, whose aim is to advance Java-based scientific and technical computing.