[invalidator]

It depends on the language you're using.

For my Ruby example, each of those method calls will allocate an Array on the heap, where it will persist until all references are removed and the GC runs again. The extra overhead of the named reference is somewhere between Tiny and Zero, depending on your interpreter. No extra copies are made; it's just a reference.

In most compiled languages: the overhead is exactly zero. At runtime, nothing even knows it's called "data" unless you have debug symbols.

If these are going to be large arrays and you actually care about memory usage, you wouldn't write the code the way I did. You might use lazy enumerators, or just flatten it out into a simple procedure; either of those would process one line at a time, discarding all the intermediate results as it goes.

Also, "File.readlines(i).count" is an atrocity of wasted memory. If you care about efficiency at all, that's the first part to go. :)