I expected that appending items to a list by setting (or copying
to) the end of a list would be fairly efficient, but found it's
not. It appears that the process grows with the size of a list, so
that the time involved grows exponentially, at least with the ways
I've tried so far. For instance, creating a list as follows take
about 1 second for 500 loop iterations, 4 seconds for 1000, and 32
seconds for 2000:
set startTime to (time of (current date))
set theList1 to {}
set timeStamp to 0
repeat with idx from 1 to 2000
set end of theList1 to {timeStamp, noteOn, 60, 100}
set end of theList1 to {timeStamp + 1, noteOn, 60, 0}
set timeStamp to timeStamp + 1
end repeat
(time of (current date)) - startTime
this small changes fasten it drastically:
property theList1 : {}
set noteOn to false
set startTime to (time of (current date))
set theList1 to {}
set timeStamp to 0
repeat with idx from 1 to 2000
set end of my theList1 to {timeStamp, noteOn, 60, 100}
set end of my theList1 to {timeStamp + 1, noteOn, 60, 0}
set timeStamp to timeStamp + 1
end repeat
(time of (current date)) - startTime
