compiled or not?

[ji3m]

I had presumed that ppl was "compiled" in the sense that all variables and function names were resolved at compile time. But this really can't be true since there is no linker step.

As my program got larger it also ran slower and slower. It seems that all variables and functions are looked up (resolved) by runtime searches through all the various scopes.

So my questions is, are the runtime symbol tables sorted.? If so is it alphabetical?

Should my most used variables be aaaamyvar or AAAAmyvar if performance is important.
I am measuring almost 1 millisecond per variable access but it varies widely with the number of variables.