This has always confused me, and even in my book I took a simplified approach to explaining lists.
It is definitely worth working hard on this passage to choose clear and agreed words.
a.
Hallo, Hans-Christoph Steiner hat gesagt: // Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
In keeping with the FLOSSmanuals methodology, we need a story to tell
when introducing lists. I have the intro done, but now we need a story (i.e. developing an example program). I was thinking that a story involving only lists of numbers would be a good place to start.
Sorry for not being able to contribute much currently (I'm moving houses) but I think a neat usecase for lists and meta messages (which are important to explain in that context as well) could be the ADSR envelope. Its parameters are a list of four (rsp. five with level) numbers. It can be very useful to be able to set a ADSR by passing complete lists. It can also be useful to set the parameters with meta-messages like "A 20, D 30, S 76, R 300".
Here's an implementation of an adsr that relies heavily on list-processing: http://footils.org/cms/weblog/2009/mar/21/adsr-envelopes-pd/
I would also strongly recommend to use a consistent terminology for lists that are not lists in the Pd sense: I would call them meta-messages just like Miller does, and if there's ambiguity the manual should call proper lists "list-messages".
In the Lists-chapter at http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/PureData/Lists it may be useful to also use a non-commutative math object like [/] or [-] with list-input, because that's a useful trick to quickly get the inverse or complement of a number: [1 $1(---[/ ]
Ciao
Frank
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