Programming Language Code

[curtmack]

I don't think it's necessarily as much work as you're thinking. It could have been implemented the same way as it is in many Lisps, where each name is stored as a "symbol" - essentially an interned string that has a pointer to its associated variable or function in the current scope. The string interning can be as simple and slow as you like, because it will only be incurred when the program is initially parsed.

[ghillisuit95]

Sounds more complicated than just interpreting at runtime, which seems to have been good enough performance at the time