Yorick is an interpreted language like Basic or Lisp.  For an interpreter,
Yorick is very fast for many scientific applications.  It features:

     * A C-like language, but without declarative statements.
     * An X window system interactive graphics package.
     * Yorick's binary file package can read or write floating point
       formats foreign to the machine where Yorick is running.
     * A library of functions written in the Yorick language.
     * Provisions for embedding compiled subroutines and functions within
       a Yorick interpreter.

Because Yorick can read either text or binary files, it can be used
"out of the box" as a pre- and post-processor for most existing
physics simulation programs.

Read the article in the Nov/Dec 1995 issue of Computers in Physics
(Vol. 9, p. 609) for more details.