Request for timing information

I am writing genetic code that must be run in every agent (potentially 
a large number) and requires some nested looping over what could be a 
large number of elements.  I need to get some accurate information on 
timing of some operations in breve/steve and I think that they'd be 
useful for everybody (and might end up in the documentation 
eventually).  What I'd like is information on the cost of the 
operations mentioned below in both some absolute and relative terms.  
(For example, is the cost of the indexed retrieval from a list O(N), 
with what constant and how does this constant compare to that of method 
call overhead?)  Some of this is, I am sure, constant time and 
insignifigant--I just would like some relative idea of the costs.  I 
assume a pretty simple test could be configured to perform a large 
number of each operation that doesn't have a clear answer and the 
profiling information extracted and averaged.

	the cost of an object method call (and value return)
	the cost of an index into an list
	the cost of prepending (vs pushing) onto a list.
	the cost of getting the size of a list (i.e. when a list is used as a 
number)
	the cost of a list copy of built in types (and does this actually copy 
the list elements, e.g. ints?)
	the cost of a hash lookup/assignment
	the cost of coercing one data type to another
	the cost of a string compare (vs an int compare)
	the cost of a type check of an object (get-type or 'is a')
	the cost of checking the object hierarchy for a method (i.e. the cost 
of sub-classing objects)
	the cost of creating of a new object

One of the questions I am trying to answer is, lacking real arrays how 
efficient are lists compared to objects (where the root list of a 
nested list is used to represent the information in a structured way 
and requires lots of indexed lookups).  Unfortunately, the easy 'self 
get-time' only deals with sim time so I cannot easily grab this info 
myself...  thanks!

-eric

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