IEnumerable vs List in C# Programming
2 min readAug 13, 2023
IEnumerable
and List
are both important concepts in C# that relate to collections and data manipulation, but they serve different purposes.
Let's explore the differences between IEnumerable
and List
:
IEnumerable:
IEnumerable
is an interface in C# that represents a collection of objects that can be enumerated (iterated) one at a time.- It provides a standard way to traverse elements in a collection without exposing the underlying implementation.
IEnumerable
is more about abstraction and laziness, meaning that it doesn't load the entire collection into memory at once but rather retrieves elements on demand.- It has a minimal set of methods like
GetEnumerator()
which returns an enumerator to iterate through the collection.
List:
List
is a concrete class in C# that implements theIEnumerable
interface.- It’s a dynamic array-like structure that can hold a collection of elements of the same type.
List
allows fast random access to elements by their index and provides methods for adding, removing, and manipulating elements.- It’s part of the System.Collections.Generic namespace and offers additional methods and properties…