metalist

A metalist is a type of list that contains other lists as its elements. This concept is often used in computer science and mathematics to represent hierarchical or nested structures. Metalists can be implemented in various programming languages and are useful for organizing data that has a recursive or tree-like structure.

In a metalist, each element can itself be a list, allowing for multiple levels of nesting. This makes metalists particularly useful for representing complex data structures, such as trees, graphs, or nested arrays. For example, a metalist can be used to represent a directory structure in a file system, where each directory contains files and subdirectories.

Metalists can be manipulated using standard list operations, such as appending, removing, and accessing elements. However, due to their nested nature, operations on metalists often require recursive algorithms to traverse or modify the entire structure.

The term "metalist" is not universally standardized, and its usage may vary depending on the context and the specific application. In some cases, the term "nested list" or "list of lists" may be used interchangeably with metalist. Despite this, the underlying concept remains the same: a list that contains other lists as its elements.