C# - What is the difference between Tuple and Dictionary and List

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I was trying to use Tuple in my application. So I want to differentiate the Tuple, Dictionary and List.

 Dictionary<int, string> dic = new Dictionary<int, string>();
 Tuple<int, string> tuple = new Tuple<int, string>();
 List<int> list = new List<int>();

What is the difference between these three?

Answer 1

First, AFAIK, There is no list that takes two type parameters - So your List could either be a List<int> or List<string> (or a SortedList<int,string> , but that's a different class).

A Tuple<T1, T2> holds two values - one int and one string in this case.
You can use a Tuple to bind together items (that might be of different types).
This may be useful in many situations, like, for instance, you want to return more then one value from a method.
I personally hate the Item1 , Item2 property names so I would probably use a wrapper class around Tuples in my code.

A Dictionary<TKey, TValue> is a collection of KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue> .
A Dictionary maps keys to values, so that you can have, for instance, a dictionary of people and for each person have their SSN as a key.

A List<T> is a collection of T .
You can get individual items by using the index, the Find method, or simply linq (since it implements IEnumerable<T> )

Answer 2

A list can store a sequence of objects in a certain order such that you can index into the list, or iterate over the list. List is a mutable type meaning that lists can be modified after they have been created.

A tuple is similar to a list except it is immutable. There is also a semantic difference between a list and a tuple. To quote Nikow's answer:

Tuples have structure, lists have order.

A dictionary is a key-value store. It is not ordered and it requires that the keys are hashable. It is fast for lookups by key.

Answer 3

So for the difference between a Dictionary and a List you've seen the question you linked to . So what is a Tuple ? By MSDN:

A tuple is a data structure that has a specific number and sequence of values. The Tuple<T1, T2> class represents a 2-tuple, or pair, which is a tuple that has two components. A 2-tuple is similar to a KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue> structure.

While the two other data structures represent different collections of items (generic to be whatever type you declare) a Tuple<T1,....> is a single item containing a predefined amount of properties - similar to defining a class with few properties.

As the two first ones are collections of items and a tuple is a single item they play very different roles in terms of what to do with them.

Read more on

• MSDN - common uses for tuples

In addition you can have a look at What requirement was the tuple designed to solve?

Answer 4

While the answer you have linked discusses the differentiation between List<T> and Dictionary<int, T> , Tuple<int, string> is not addressed.

From MSDN

Represents a 2-tuple, or pair.

A tuple is a pair of values, opposed to the other types, which represent sort of collections. Think of a method, which returns an error code and string for the last error (I would not write the code this way, but to get the idea)

Tuple<int, string> GetLastError()
{
    ...
}

Now you can use it like

var lastError = GetLastError();
Console.WriteLine($"Errorcode: {lastError.Item1}, Message: {lastError.Item2}");

This way you do not have to create a class, if you want to return a compound value.

Please Note : As of C# 7 there is a newer, more concise syntax for returning tuples.