Frank wrote

...

2 - the documentation (help patch) is unchanged, and there is no ambiguity in it: it describes the old behaviour.

You may have a different help patch than I: Mine doesn't describe this issue at all.

You have to look inside the [pd length] subpatch. It says: "The "list length" object outputs the number of arguments in a list or other message."

Though it is not very very explicit, it does describe the old behaviour strictly speaking.

I am not good at writing help-prose, otherwise I would post a corrected version. A possibility may be something like:

"The 'list length' object outputs the number of items in a list. Non-list messages are automatically converted to list before computation".

But I'm sure anyone can come up with something better.

Btw sorry again for posting the message without searching the archive.

bye m.