Programming puzzles: processing lists!

[John Keith]

Another point worth noting is that the time required for replacing or appending list objects is proportional to the square of the list size. This means that you will see a "knee" in the curve of processing time with around 100 to 250 objects depending on what proportion of the program's running time is taken by the list operations.

While this means that processing lists in this way is impractical for larger lists, it also implies that using these list operations on smaller lists does not slow programs down that much.

Manipulating objects on the stack will almost always be the fastest way though.