Scripting the Vim editor, Part 3: Built-in lists

"The heart of all programming is the creation and manipulation of data structures. So far in this series, we’ve considered only Vimscript’s scalar data types (strings, numbers, and booleans) and the scalar variables that store them. But the true power of programming Vim becomes apparent when its scripts can operate on entire collections of related data at once: reformatting lists of text lines, accessing multidimensional tables of configuration data, filtering sequences of filenames, and sorting sets of line numbers.

"In this article, we’ll explore Vimscript’s excellent support for lists and the arrays that store them, as well as the language's many built-in functions that make using lists so easy, efficient, and maintainable.

"Lists in Vimscript

"In Vimscript, a list is a sequence of scalar values: strings, numbers, references, or any mixture thereof. Vimscript lists are arguably misnamed. In most languages, a "list" is a value (rather than a container), an immutable ordered sequence of simpler values. In contrast, lists in Vimscript are mutable and in many ways far more like (references to) anonymous-array data structures. A Vimscript variable that is storing a list is, for most purposes, an array."

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