Origin and Rationale

An Introduction to LINQ - slide 1 : 11

LINQ = Languge Integrated Query

The main ideas behind LINQ come from functional programming languages and database query languages (SQL)

LINQ and functional programming
- Builds on old ideas from Lisp: Map, filter, reduce.
- Programming without (side)effects
- Lazy evaluation
LINQ and SQL
- LINQ is a query language
- LINQ fragments are translated to SQL (via so-called Expression Trees)

LINQ - as used from C# - can both be used on all kinds of .NET collections, and instead of SQL