Comments on: Functional C#: LINQ vs Method chaining

By: Bent Rasmussen

Bent Rasmussen — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:50:34 +0000

LINQ syntax is just syntactic sugar for direct method chaining so it depends on what syntax you prefer. I tend to favor method chaining in general.

By: Matt Warren

Matt Warren — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:31:42 +0000

There’s a good discussion on StackOverflow that talks about this, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/214500/.

Also from the msdn page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397947.aspx:

In general, we recommend query syntax because it is usually simpler and more readable; however there is no semantic difference between method syntax and query syntax. In addition, some queries, such as those that retrieve the number of elements that match a specified condition, or that retrieve the element that has the maximum value in a source sequence, can only be expressed as method calls.

So there is no difference between the 2 by the time it’s executed.

By: googly

googly — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:07:31 +0000

@Mark: That is my understanding as well.
Also, in ReSharper, there’s a refactoring command that can convert between the two different statement types.

By: Mark Needham

Mark Needham — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:55:15 +0000

I don’t know for definite but I was of the opinion that the LINQ syntax compiles down to be the method calls anyway?

By: Bart Czernicki

Bart Czernicki — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:43:12 +0000

I prefer LINQ’s terse and declareative nature.

I think method chaining is valuable in situations where you need to build your queries dynamically.

It would be interesting to see the performance difference between the three options. My guess would be that F#’s syntax/compiler would be faster and LINQ would take the most memory.

By: Ola Bini

Ola Bini — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:08:59 +0000

I think you can use aggregate in the Linq statement to sum it – but I’m not a 100% about that.