List and StringList

Both types share the common List API. They differ only in what they store, and StringList adds sorting.

List

List is the general-purpose sequence. Each cell holds Any: numbers, strings, Bool, Null, or other objects (including nested lists and maps). Items do do not need to be the same type.

List.new^ >ts
"hello" t:.append^
42 t:.append^
true t:.append^
null t:.append^
t:.len@ $ nl    // 4
t:drop

Use List when the element type varies, or when you are building a temporary list of mixed values (for example before rendering Json).

StringList

StringList stores only String values. That keeps storage compact for the common “list of text” case, and rejects non-string appends.

StringList.new^ >ts
"alpha" t:.append^
"Beta" t:.append^
"gamma" t:.append^
t:.sort^
t:peek foreach
  i $ sp
/foreach
nl
t:drop

sort

// ( -- )
.sort^

StringList#sort orders by Utf-8 byte values. In plain ASCII that puts uppercase before lowercase ("Beta" before "alpha"). It is not locale-aware alphabetic sorting.

List (Any cells) does not provide sort.