Historically, many systems have been implementing local variables in terms of a single global symbol-table, but for many reasons, few systems do it like that nowadays. The only remaining such examples I can think of are:
puh ... i just figured out, that my performance patch fills the symbol table with more than 10000 unique (!!!) symbols ... plus one additional symbol every second due my badly designed clock...
i'd strongly suggest to enlarge the hash-table any try to find a better solution for symbols ...
also ... after loading pd itself 397 symbol symbols are in use ... after including my .pdrc file 4400 are in use (more than twice the size of the hashtable) ... without loading any patch ...
cheers ... tim