Advice on building lists from a notecard, please

I'm making something to wear that reads data from a notecard (command, animation, offset, and a couple of other things).

Is it better practice to read everything into one list and then, at runtime, say n = llListFindList(big_list,[command]); strMyAnim = llList2String(big_list, n+1); etc or to split them into separate lists when I read them at start up and look for llList2String(anim_list, n)? Or doesn't it make a lot of difference?

I suppose one consideration is that -- if I properly understand it -- I have to read the offset with llList2String and then typecast it as a vector, and I will only have to do that the one time if I create separate lists.

if you need different type casting for different items, then yeah, it'll probably be easier to do it as it's read, saving you code later.

however if all items are a set stride length, you can actually do this as a list cleanup for a single master list, by looping through every stride-length elements and using list 2 string to read them, cast them to vector, then list replace save them back.

correcting the type at load or cleanup will add a hair of time there, but save a hair later, and over time uses less processor cycles.

the difference is only minor in which method you use, separate lists will take a small amount of memory more, but can sometime be more readable in code.

ETA:
list find WILL run faster for separate lists, since it inst checking irrelevant entries, or using stride functions to search

Thanks. I must certainly remember the list-cleanup idea; from you say, it's not really necessary for what I'm doing right now, but I do like it.

Thanks, too, for confirming my gut feeling that splitting things into separate lists is a sensible way to do it. It seemed to me sensible to do as much work as possible just the one time, when I read the notecard, and then, at run-time, just figure out which item number I'm using and then look for item number n on each list.

It's just that someone said, "be careful about using too many lists," so I thought I'd better check.

I think the 'too many lists' thing may be a holdover from before mono... LSO can be painfully slow processing list commands.

one thing I like to do is seperate my notecard reading function to it's own state... that way I can run manipulations on the data in state exit, and if I need to I can return to reading the notecard w/o wiping out other variables, plus it lets me limit user input easily while it's still reading the data.

you can do all that without a separate state, but it gets messy to look at and check which actions are ok at a given time, plus makes debugging a little easier.