hp48 working with large lists

[Werner]

I don't quite understand what the issue is.
You're trying to modify an element of a list under low memory conditions so you can't afford to have the list there twice, right?
Then, how would it be possible to assemble the list again?
I'm afraid there's no miracle possible here - both exploding and assembling lists will take the memory of the list plus the memory of its constituting objects...

BTW deleting the variable that contains a list merely moves the list from USEROB to TEMPOB and will not gain you anything memory-wise, except longer garbage collections for large (exploded) lists ;-)
(some list commands purposefully save the list in a user variable to avoid the gc issue)

Cheers, Werner

Update: exploding a list does not take twice the memory as it only uses up stack pointers to point within the list - but you wanted the objects themselves with NEWOB, and that does take twice the memory.