When I send "clear" into the right inlet of [list cat], and then try to re-populate the list by sending something into the left inlet, pure data crashes.

Does this happen to anyone else?

Actually, better put, it seems [list cat] in Purr Data is just a limited version of [list store], which can append, prepend and do more things in Pd Vanilla. So they're very different, cause [list store] is more powerful, so it just seems that [list cast] is superfluous. So when I ask how different they are, it was more of a rhetorical question... I see now that I tested that there are different design choices, where [list cat] keeps outputting values when appending. I personally think it makes more sense the way this is handled in [list store], where you get the list you want in the end with a bang.

BTW, I don't see [list store] documented in Purr Data.

The class exists, it just wasn't listed in the help patch. It is now.

Also, I just saw that [list cat] wasn't reentrant. It will be in the next release.

not sure if you've also documented [list fromsymbol] and [list tosymbol] as well

not sure if you've also documented [list fromsymbol] and [list tosymbol] as well

Yes, I have.

I did a little testing on my Chromebook for accumulating lists of 10, 100, and 1000 floats with [list cat], [list store], [list prepend]x[t a], and "add2 $1" with a message box.

• [list store] is the fastest, but message box accumulation has pretty close performance to it
• [list prepend]x[t a] is the slowest with [list cat] the 2nd slowest
• all require memory allocations above 100 elements which increase their worst-time performance

So I'd say [list cat] is there mostly for backward compatibility at this point.

BTW-- I haven't tested it, but I'd bet that [list split] is significantly faster than using the "get" message with [list store], especially for large lists.

@jancsika [textfile] seems even faster: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/10556/vanilla-list2symbol-abstraction-pd-0-47/9

Thanks for looking into that and clarifying @jancsika. And thank you @porres for pointing out the [list store] option.

@Jona [textfile] uses the same data structure underneath as a message box. So the performance for accumulating a list should be about the same as a message box. But I haven't tested it.

@jancsika thanks, interesting to know that they use the same data structure. in the link from my last post is a test.