Are there any advantages to using lists verses blocks?
The advantages become more obvious with large lists when doing inserts or removes. On a large block, all the data gets shuffled doing an insert at the head. On a list, existing data is never moved. This means that lists take more space than blocks as there is a linked list associated with the data. However, the speed advantages are significant. Here’s an example: >> blk: make block! 20000 == [] >> t: now/time loop 20000 [ insert head blk 1 ] now/time – t == 0:00:35 >> lst: make list! 20000 == make list! [] >> t: now/time loop 20000 [ insert head lst 1 ] now/time – t == 0:00 NOTE: The time for BLK is not linear with the number of iterations because the amount of data that must be moved with each insert becomes larger and larger.
