hi,
Recently someone posted something over on the Pd list that had this question inside part of a bigger question. I was interested in it but it didn't seem to get an answer so I thought I would try here...I know that Max has limits for list length but I was wondering if in Pd there is a maximum number of elements that can be listed?
Likewise are the maximum limits to what can go into a message box?
What about an array?

I am sure someone has asked this before but I did not see any results when I searched for it.
thanks in advance!
jorge

@Coalman In 64-bit Pd........ list_test.pd

I remember Arrays were limited to 4 million elements by [soundfiler] in 32-bit Pd but that could be increased, although it would cause problems with single precision floats...... https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/3260/long-soundfiles-in-pd/10
For 64-bit Pd an array can be bigger.... about 2 billion elements........ see your Pd/doc/1.manual/x5.htm and scroll down to Pd 0.49.
David.

@Coalman If the list/messages is made up of symbols it will slow things down when that list gets long, but this is more a fault of symbols than lists. If the list is floats/integers you probably will want to switch to arrays when they start getting larger just because arrays are faster since some of the list objects rely on iterating the entire list, when you use [list prepend/append] it iterates through the entire list to append or prepend the new items, in array it just adds them on. The new methods for [list store] coming out in pd 0.52 will probably lessen the difference between lists and arrays and even make lists faster for some things, but I think arrays are still generally faster. For a list of symbols I believe how big you can get is dependent upon processor speed but there is no limit, you just need to realize that a patch which works fine on one computer might be slow on a less powerful computer.

also if the list size is < 100 the elements are allocated on the stack rather than the heap (which is faster). There's no limit on the length except for available RAM though.

Thanks everyone!
Great and informative answers!
Jorge