Does list.count physically iterate through the list to count it, or does it keep a pointer

Question

I am stepping through a large list of object to do some stuff regarding said objects in the list.

During my iteration, I will remove some objects from the list depen

Answer 1

It simply keeps an internal int to track the number of items. So no iteration. The documentation says retrieving Count is an O(1) operation:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/27b47ht3%28v=vs.110%29.aspx

You can see for yourself:

http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/collections/generic/list.cs