Variable Hashtable

At the moment when we lookup variable names in our language we just do a linear search over all of the variables in the environment. This gets more and more inefficient the more variables we have defined.

A more efficient way to do this is to implement a Hash Table. This technique converts the variable name to an integer and uses this to index into an array of a known size to find the value associated with this symbol. This is a really important data structure in programming and will crop up everywhere because of its fantastic performance under heavy loads.

Anyone who is interested in learning more about data structures and algorithms would be smart to take a shot at implementing this data structure or one of its variations.