I'm not sure if anyone here would need to use [list2symbol] that works in vanilla but I just created one today since someone in the Facebook group asked for it.
It works just like zexy's [list2symbol]. it works from pd-0.47. I hope someone finds it useful.

Download: vl2s.pd

Hi, @LiamG. Thanks for your suggestion.
I created [vs2f] abstraction which converts symbol to float.
I just added a floating point interpretation feature on top of your patch.
So now [vs2l] can be unpacked to floats as well.
I see your point. It could get faster with some replacements. Maybe someone can replace the parts if necessary.
But I think the current one would be fast enough to use in most cases.
Anyways, I hope someone finds it useful.

Download : vl2s_vs2l_vs2f.zip

i tried to simplify the abstractions with help from the objects [fudiparse] and [fudiformat].
[vs2f] is replaced with [fudiparse].


vfs2l.zip

I am also interested in the comment from @LiamG regarding accumulating lists 3 posts above. He showed an example with textfile instead of iterating lists with list prepend and trigger like in the abstraction. Or would it make sense to use Text define\get\set for accumulating lists instead? Maybe only for long lists (one would need a few more objects?)? Or, more in general, what do you think is the best method for accumulating lists with pure data?

@Jona I believe [append $1( to [list store] is the best and fastest. I havn't done the comparison with [textfile], but it is considerably faster than [text].

[textfile] is actually faster than [list store]: textfiletest.pd

and to iterate a list is much slower, so i use [textfile] for now.
the larger the list the bigger the difference, for small lists the difference between the methods is neglectable.

here is the improved abstraction: vfs2l.zip

@Jona Nice. I added a [list] object to the end to guarantee that the output is a list
vfs2l.pd

here is my attempt for l2s (together with s2l): vfs2ll2s.zip
[vfs2l] does not accept delimiters with more than one character yet.

and here is a vanilla symbol2list abstraction that accepts more than one character as a delimiter (it could be a little inefficient):
vfs2l2b.zip