List Commands Library for 50g

[DavidM]

(08-25-2017 06:53 PM)pier4r Wrote:  Uh, I did not think that the string functions on the 50g where that fast. I thought that, being strings (and not number or containers for numbers) they would be the slowest functions of the library.

I can see where you might come to that conclusion, but it turns out not to be the case. Lists are generally slower in RPL than strings for similar functions, mostly due to two things:

- List elements aren't indexed (internally they are always accessed sequentially)
- List elements can be any object (including other lists), so no assumptions can be made about their size or contents

In contrast, strings have:
- A built-in count
- Fixed-length elements
- Elements of only one type

...so writing code to process them efficiently is much easier. There's usually no floating point considerations when manipulating strings, so the code lends itself well to assembly language implementations as well. This makes the possibility of fast manipulation of strings much more likely than lists, at least in RPL contexts.