Is yield useful outside of LINQ?

Question

When ever I think I can use the yield keyword, I take a step back and look at how it will impact my project. I always end up returning a collection instead of yeilding becau

Answer 1

Note that yield allows you to do things in a "lazy" way. By lazy, I mean that the evaluation of the next element in the IEnumberable is not done until the element is actually requested. This allows you the power to do a couple of different things. One is that you could yield an infinitely long list without the need to actually make infinite calculations. Second, you could return an enumeration of function applications. The functions would only be applied when you iterate through the list.

Answer 2

Personnally, I haven't found I'm using yield in my normal day-to-day programming. However, I've recently started playing with the Robotics Studio samples and found that yield is used extensively there, so I also see it being used in conjunction with the CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) where you have async and concurrency issues.

Anyway, still trying to get my head around it as well.

Answer 3

At a previous company, I found myself writing loops like this:

for (DateTime date = schedule.StartDate; date <= schedule.EndDate; 
     date = date.AddDays(1))

With a very simple iterator block, I was able to change this to:

foreach (DateTime date in schedule.DateRange)

It made the code a lot easier to read, IMO.

Answer 4

I recently had to make a representation of mathematical expressions in the form of an Expression class. When evaluating the expression I have to traverse the tree structure with a post-order treewalk. To achieve this I implemented IEnumerable<T> like this:

public IEnumerator<Expression<T>> GetEnumerator()
{
    if (IsLeaf)
    {
        yield return this;
    }
    else
    {
        foreach (Expression<T> expr in LeftExpression)
        {
            yield return expr;
        }
        foreach (Expression<T> expr in RightExpression)
        {
            yield return expr;
        }
        yield return this;
    }
}

Then I can simply use a foreach to traverse the expression. You can also add a Property to change the traversal algorithm as needed.

Answer 5

Whenever your function returns IEnumerable you should use "yielding". Not in .Net > 3.0 only.

.Net 2.0 example:

  public static class FuncUtils
  {
      public delegate T Func<T>();
      public delegate T Func<A0, T>(A0 arg0);
      public delegate T Func<A0, A1, T>(A0 arg0, A1 arg1);
      ... 

      public static IEnumerable<T> Filter<T>(IEnumerable<T> e, Func<T, bool> filterFunc)
      {
          foreach (T el in e)
              if (filterFunc(el)) 
                  yield return el;
      }


      public static IEnumerable<R> Map<T, R>(IEnumerable<T> e, Func<T, R> mapFunc)
      {
          foreach (T el in e) 
              yield return mapFunc(el);
      }
        ...

Answer 6

I'm not sure about C#'s implementation of yield(), but on dynamic languages, it's far more efficient than creating the whole collection. on many cases, it makes it easy to work with datasets much bigger than RAM.