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by James Robertson.
Original Post: List vs. OrderedCollection
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OrderedCollection. Fond memories. I think this was the first object I fell in love with--I was coming from a FORTRAN background, and not having to declare the size of arrays was like, wow!
At some point, List came along. List looks kind of OrderedCollection-ish. The original pitch was that you used List for collections behind List views. So I relegated it to that niche. And have continued to use OrderedCollection for many of my tasks.
I've noticed that many OrderedCollection life cycles are interesting. To begin with, there's a phase were you're building them. In this phase, you just want to add to them. You're not enumerating them or anything. That phase completes after some arbitrary adds. And then it never changes size again. It's basically a static sized array.
I thought I'd relook at List to see how it fared in this common case. For the add: case, adding objects to List is nearly TWO times FASTER than OrderedCollections. For enumerating them via do:, it's about 20% SLOWER.
So I've decided to begin using List a little more. The speeds are a wash I guess, but List is only four characters to spell out, and OrderedCollection is 17.
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