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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T01:38:04+00:00

Why does the Collections.Seq module have lots of methods that appear to be equivalent

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Why does the Collections.Seq module have lots of methods that appear to be equivalent to extension methods declared in System.Linq.Enumerable? Why did the designers of F# feel the need to create a new namespace and new/different names for all of these instead of reusing what already exists in .NET?

(If they needed some extra methods, why didn’t they just add them to System.Linq.Enumerable?)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Some other decent answers here, but my take is briefly

    • partial application (.NET methods are tupled, F# methods are curried)
    • overloading (.NET methods are overloaded, F# let-bound values cannot be)

    Basically, once you’re accustomed to F# idioms, you’ll discover that the .NET APIs kind of suck for F#-style programming. F# is heavily geared towards pipeline-style programming (which requires partial application of the incoming sequence as the last curried argument) and type-inference (which interacts badly with overloading).

    So F# has its own library which works well with F#. (Here’s a quickie decoder-ring blog.)

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