Yorick

Yorick is the deceased court-jester whose bones are exhumed by the gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The sight of Yorick's skull evokes a monologue from Prince Hamlet on the vile effects of death. The contrast between Yorick as "a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy" and his grim remains is a variation on the theme of earthly vanity: death being unavoidable, the things of this life are inconsequential. Hamlet meditating upon the skull of Yorick has become a lasting embodiment of this idea.

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Yorick is also an interpreted programming language designed for numerics[?], graph plotting and steering large scientific simulation codes. It is quite fast due to array syntax, and extensible via C or Fortran routines. It was created in 1996 by David Munro[?].

Visit the Yorick Homepage (http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/languages/yorick/doc/index)