JS : Levenshtein distance for two lists or strings

Hello

I'm completely new to using the js object, and my javascript knowledge
is still limited to what I could get from codecademy, so please forgive my ignorance…

I want to import into Max a function I use frequently in Lisp and Lisp-like environments,
the Levenshtein distance, which computes how many basic operations (add, delete, replace) you need to get from one sequence to another.

I got the javascript code from here : http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance#JavaScript
and tried to adapt it for js object, but I'm stuck with to problems.

1) how to apply this to lists made of symbols (ex: a b c and a b a c)?
Of course, JS reads these as arrays of variables, which is wrong...
The functions accepts normally only strings, but also works with string arrays,
like ["a", "b", "c"], yet I can't understand how to convert properly the max lists to strings
or string arrays ("tosymbol" is useless).

2) how to get the output... even for lists of integers of floats?
I thought these would be converted to [1, 2, 3] for instance,
but even this way my code doesn't produce any output.

Here's my js code for now :

inlets = 2;
outlets = 1;

var str1;
var str2;

function list() 
{
    if(inlet==0) 
    {
    str1 = arrayfromargs(arguments);
    } 
    else if(inlet==1) 
    { 
    str2 = arrayfromargs(arguments);
    }
}

function levenshtein(str1, str2) {
    var m = str1.length,
        n = str2.length,
        d = [],
        i, j;
 
    if (!m) return n;
    if (!n) return m;
 
    for (i = 0; i 

Thanks in advance for your help
Best

Julien