List Commands Library for 50g

[DavidM]

David, your example program is actually a very good "test subject" for discussion, because it allows me to pinpoint some specific comparisons that I continue to question every time I start down the path of adding another command to this library.

Your straightforward (and well-written) program weighs in at 63.5 bytes of storage, and although it performs a more generic function than the defined LPICK, it certainly accommodates the same functionality very easily.

For comparison, the current version of LPICK weighs in at 243.5 bytes, and is "hard-wired" to only provide the << GET >> function without allowing other variants as your UserRPL program does.

While that may seem like a very poor result for LPICK, that's only part of the picture. Running equivalent "picks" of 650 elements from a source list containing 1300, your program completes in 27.4 seconds while the same data is processed by LPICK in 2.7 seconds. The reason for both the size and the speed difference is the same: two embedded Saturn routines in LPICK take up a lot of space but get the final result much faster.

So the question becomes: "what's the relative value of size (and additional menu items) vs. speed?" I know there's no easy answers here, but it's a legitimate concern. At this point I'm inclined to include the command, mainly because I think it's very versatile and the performance is good. Your point is good, though, that there needs to be a limit to the special-casing. It's really just another form of "feature creep", and that's a potential problem for all projects.