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I’m looking at List and I see a BinarySearch method with a few overloads, and I can’t help wondering if it makes sense at all to have a method like that in List?
Why would I want to do a binary search unless the list was sorted? And if the list wasn’t sorted, calling the method would just be a waste of CPU time. What’s the point of having that method on List?
Sorting and searching are two very common operations on lists. It would be unfriendly to limit a developer’s options by not offering binary search on a regular list.
Library design requires compromises – the .NET designers chose to offer the binary search function on both arrays and lists in C# because they likely felt (as I do) that these are useful and common operations, and programmers who choose to use them understand their prerequisites (namely that the list is ordered) before calling them.
It’s easy enough to sort a
List<T>using one of theSort()overloads. If you feel that you need an invariant that gaurantees sorting, you can always useSortedList<TKey,TValue>orSortedSet<T>instead.