How does the performance of Yorick degrade as the number of objects increases?
Yorick variables are looked up in hash tables *at parse time only*; thereafter they are refenced by index. The only performance penalty is an extra level of indirection, which you pay independent of how many variables there are. Since Yorick creates and destroys temporary arrays very frequently, it may be possible to write a Yorick program which spends most of its time in malloc and free operations. I have seen malloc and free take up to 10% or 20% of a Yorick program. It turns out that memory manager performance on most UNIX workstations is rather poor… Anyway, the answer to your question is that the real performance penalty to worry about is malloc and free in creating temporaries in Yorick expressions, and not the number of Yorick variables. In practice, I would be very surprised if the kind of problems I think you are talking about overwhelmed Yorick by sheer complexity of number of objects.
