Lists

Almost every language has arrays or lists and Magpie is no different. If you have a bunch of items that you want to lump together and identify programmatically, it's hard to beat them. A list is a compound object that holds a collection of elements identified by index. You can create a list by placing a sequence of comma-separated expressions inside square brackets:

[1, "banana", true]

Here, we've created a list of three elements. Notice that the elements don't have to be the same type.

Accessing Elements

You can access an element from a list by calling the subscript operator on it with the index of the element you want. Like most languages, indexes start at zero:

val hirsute = ["sideburns", "porkchops", "'stache"]
hirsute[0] // "sideburns"
hirsute[1] // "porkchops"

If you pass in an index that's greater than the number of items in the list, it throws an OutOfBoundsError. If you pass in a negative index, it counts backwards from the end:

hirsute[-1] // "'stache"
hirsute[-2] // "porkchops"

Of course, if you go too negative and shoot past the first item, that throws an error too. If you don't know how far that is, you can always find out by getting the number of items in the list using count:

hirsute count // 3