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.
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.html)