Title: List Tools v1.alpha1
Description: Tools for manipulating lists of things, and in particular, lists of taxonomic names (i.e. 'checklists'), which are sometimes organized hierachically ('taxonomies').
Author: Jonathan A. Rees
As of January 2026, this software is located in 'jar398/listtools' on github.com. The location for any or all versions may change from time to time in the future, so look around to find the latest version.
The is research-grade software, by which I mean that I've done the minimum to make it work on the examples in front of me. I do have some experience in software engineering, but it does not show here. There have been frequent changes of algorithms, data structures, and philosophy, and this fact bleeds through into the code and internal interfaces. Documentation is poor, there is dead code, there are no unit tests or modules. There is no web UI or graphical UI, just command line (bash) or script (python3) use.
See here
The genesis for this software was a conversation around 2018 or 2019 at ASU with Nico Franz, who suggested that a generic tool for comparing checklists might be widely useful. Before this conversation I had been working on Smasher (see article), which did something similar in a different way (similar to the 'splits' of Redelings and Holder), and I felt a desire to rewrite it on firmer theoretical, philosophical, and nomenclatural foundations to make it more sound, and to create a free-standing tool independent of the open tree of life project or any other framework.
This tool suite replaces the older 'checklist diff' tool.
As of 2026 an article on listtools is in preparation. We will endeavor to make the supplementary material reproducible from source material available on the Internet. Please see the notes on reproduction at the top of shell file doc/colmdd.sh.