On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 01:54:38PM -0700, Jordan Cooper wrote:
Thank you, Daniel and Yitzchak! I think that will be enough to get me started. As a general question, at what number of elements does it become impractical to use Lists?
It's really not a question of number of elements, but of how you use the lists. If you are doing stream-processing sorts of things, you can even idiomatically and efficiently use lists that are infinitely long! What lists are not good for is things where you need to do lots of indexing, since indexing into a list requires first traversing the beginning of the list. However for small lists like 8-element lists, it really doesn't make much of a difference. You might now ask: well, suppose I need to do indexing; at what number of elements does it become impractical to use lists? The answer is: it depends, probably somewhere between 10 and 1 million. Use lists, and if it's too slow, you can switch later. -Brent