Why not inherit from List?

Question

When planning out my programs, I often start with a chain of thought like so:

A football team is just a list of football players. Therefore, I should

Answer 1

Design > Implementation

What methods and properties you expose is a design decision. What base class you inherit from is an implementation detail. I feel it's worth taking a step back to the former.

An object is a collection of data and behaviour.

So your first questions should be:

• What data does this object comprise in the model I'm creating?
• What behaviour does this object exhibit in that model?
• How might this change in future?

Bear in mind that inheritance implies an "isa" (is a) relationship, whereas composition implies a "has a" (hasa) relationship. Choose the right one for your situation in your view, bearing in mind where things might go as your application evolves.

Consider thinking in interfaces before you think in concrete types, as some people find it easier to put their brain in "design mode" that way.

This isn't something everyone does consciously at this level in day to day coding. But if you're mulling this sort of topic, you're treading in design waters. Being aware of it can be liberating.

Consider Design Specifics

Take a look at List and IList on MSDN or Visual Studio. See what methods and properties they expose. Do these methods all look like something someone would want to do to a FootballTeam in your view?

Does footballTeam.Reverse() make sense to you? Does footballTeam.ConvertAll() look like something you want?

This isn't a trick question; the answer might genuinely be "yes". If you implement/inherit List or IList, you're stuck with them; if that's ideal for your model, do it.

If you decide yes, that makes sense, and you want your object to be treatable as a collection/list of players (behaviour), and you therefore want to implement ICollection or IList, by all means do so. Notionally:

class FootballTeam : ... ICollection
{
    ...
}

If you want your object to contain a collection/list of players (data), and you therefore want the collection or list to be a property or member, by all means do so. Notionally:

class FootballTeam ...
{
    public ICollection Players { get { ... } }
}

You might feel that you want people to be able to only enumerate the set of players, rather than count them, add to them or remove them. IEnumerable is a perfectly valid option to consider.

You might feel that none of these interfaces are useful in your model at all. This is less likely (IEnumerable is useful in many situations) but it's still possible.

Anyone who attempts to tell you that one of these it is categorically and definitively wrong in every case is misguided. Anyone who attempts to tell you it is categorically and definitively right in every case is misguided.

Move on to Implementation

Once you've decided on data and behaviour, you can make a decision about implementation. This includes which concrete classes you depend on via inheritance or composition.

This may not be a big step, and people often conflate design and implementation since it's quite possible to run through it all in your head in a second or two and start typing away.

A Thought Experiment

An artificial example: as others have mentioned, a team is not always "just" a collection of players. Do you maintain a collection of match scores for the team? Is the team interchangable with the club, in your model? If so, and if your team isa collection of players, perhaps it also isa collection of staff and/or a collection of scores. Then you end up with:

class FootballTeam : ... ICollection, 
                         ICollection,
                         ICollection
{
    ....
}

Design notwithstanding, at this point in C# you won't be able to implement all of these by inheriting from List anyway, since C# "only" supports single inheritance. (If you've tried this malarky in C++, you may consider this a Good Thing.) Implementing one collection via inheritance and one via composition is likely to feel dirty. And properties such as Count become confusing to users unless you implement ILIst.Count and IList.Count etc. explicitly, and then they're just painful rather than confusing. You can see where this is going; gut feeling whilst thinking down this avenue may well tell you it feels wrong to head in this direction (and rightly or wrongly, your colleagues might also if you implemented it this way!)

The Short Answer (Too Late)

The guideline about not inheriting from collection classes isn't C# specific, you'll find it in many programming languages. It is received wisdom not a law. One reason is that in practice composition is considered to often win out over inheritance in terms of comprehensibility, implementability and maintainability. It's more common with real world / domain objects to find useful and consistent "hasa" relationships than useful and consistent "isa" relationships unless you're deep in the abstract, most especially as time passes and the precise data and behaviour of objects in code changes. This shouldn't cause you to always rule out inheriting from collection classes; but it may be suggestive.