The Bloj

I <3 LINQ

Posted on February 5th, 2008 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..

I just started a little pet project, and figured this would be a good time to start training myself to think in terms of LINQ. I started out writing a function that looked sort of like this:

public double Length
{
  get
  {
    double max = 0;
    foreach (FunctionClip clip in _clips)
    {
      max = Math.Max(max, clip.End);
    }
    return max;
  }
}

Then I noticed that there was an extension method called Max on arrays. As a result, the above function simplifies to:

public double Length
{
  get
  {
    return _clips.Max(f => f.End);
  }
}

Six lines of code suddenly turned into one! At this point, the gears were turning in my head. Suddenly, the foreach construct seemed less elegant:

foreach (FunctionClip clip in _clips)
{
  clip.RenderTo(data, freq);
}

Could this be made simpler? Sure, check it out:

_clips.ForEach(c => c.RenderTo(data, freq));

Not quite as dramatic as before, but in raw number of lines we’ve still reduced by a factor of four. Making code more compact increases readability, which in turn leads to less bugs. LINQ FTW!

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