Does NetLogo have arrays?
What NetLogo calls “lists” are actually implemented internally as arrays, so they have some of the performance characteristics of arrays. For example, random access (using the item reporter) takes constant time. However, they’re immutable arrays (they cannot be altered except by making a copy and altering the copy), so replace-item is linear time, not constant-time (because the whole array is copied). For most purposes, the performance differences between lists and arrays doesn’t matter; it only matters if you’re dealing with very long lists. In a future version of NetLogo we plan to change our lists to be ordinary singly linked lists as in other Logo (and Lisp) implementations. At the same time, we will also provide real, mutable arrays as a separate data type.
