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I was reading some entries in Eric Lippert's blog about immutable data structures and I got to thinking, why doesn't C# have this built into the standard libraries? It seems strange for something with obvious reuse to not be already implemented out of the box.
EDIT: I feel I might be misunderstood on my question. I'm not asking how to implement one in C#, I'm asking why some of the basic data structures (Stack, Queue, etc.) aren't already available as immutable variants.
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Immutable data structure are data structures, like lists, arrays, sets etc., which cannot be changed, meaning that the values inside them can't be added, removed, moved or swapped. Instead of changing the data structure you make a new version of the data structure which is a separate value.
A struct type is not immutable. Yes, strings are. Making your own type immutable is easy, simply don't provide a default constructor, make all fields private and define no methods or properties that change a field value.
To summarise the difference, mutable objects can change their state or contents and immutable objects can't change their state or content. Immutable Objects : These are of in-built types like int, float, bool, string, unicode, tuple. In simple words, an immutable object can't be changed after it is created.
In JavaScript, objects and arrays are mutable by default, but primitive values are not — once a primitive value is created, it cannot be changed, although the variable that holds it may be reassigned.
It does now.
.NET just shipped their first immutable collections, which I suggest you try out.
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