Not sure, but I think emacs at least used to have a reputation as a resourse hog and bloated. So maybe that?

For everyone who has not already, this is so worth a read: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Come on! You need those red crosses to know it fails as it should. Thats what I would say they are there for :-)

So the attack would just be a } then?

I did use ‘list’ and forgot it is called an ‘array’ or ‘vector’ in other languages. So sure, close enough :-)

Would one not just use a dict/hashmap with int keys labelling lengths and the list of strings as the values?