Question

I’m looking to add a “recently opened” functionality to my application, and was wondering if there was a simple built in way to do lists that “overflow”. By this I mean, when you add an element beyond the capacity of the list, all the items are shifted.

Code example of desired functionality (obviously its not true, the list would actually contain A,B,C):

List<string> list = new List<string>();

//if Overflow was 2

list.Add("A");
list.Add("B");
//List now contains A,B
list.Add("C");
//List now contains B,C

Sorry for the simple question. The problem itself is obvious to solve (intail plan was to inherit from List), I just don’t like having to re-invent the wheel and confuse future programmers with custom objects when the language or framework has that functionality.

Answer 1

As far as I know ther is no such collection in the library.
You can write this very easily, based on a List<> or an array.

// untested
class OverFlowList<T>
{
    T[] _data;
    int _next = 0;

    public OferflowList(int limit)
    {
        _data = new T[limit];
    }

    void Add(T item)
    {
        _data[_next] = item;
        _next = (_next + 1) % _data.Length;
    }    
}