Absolutely - in this context a sum of only the unique values would not help!
Reflecting on my own experience, I’d say I use Sets more than Lists but:
- Thats reflect deliberate choices based on the project at hand - i.e. it my simply reflect my work as opposed to use in general. (Indeed, this is why there often is no ‘correct’ answer to ‘which?’).
- The .unique functions will always give you the unique values in any List-type list data.
- The .sort, .nsort and .isort functions will (re-)sort any Set or List type list data to your criteria if the default list order is not to taste.
All this reminds me that whilst Sets were around in 2003 when I first dabbled with Tinderbox, Lists didn’t arrive until v5 in late 2009. It’s confusing that one of the two list (i.e. multi-value) attribute types is called List and that it wasn’t the original such type. But that was almost a decade ago. In the light of that perhaps need to revisit how aTbRef approaches the List-vs-Set divide and forget the latter came first. A Set is effectively a normal list (List) with 2 special characteristics: firstly it automatically de-dupes added values and (b) more obscurely you can’t always rely on the sort order of values read directly from a set attribute. In other words, though historically a set came first, it is really a ‘modified Lis’ and perhaps we should new describe it from that perspective.
HTH.