Order Comparison

As well as defining standard protocols for equality, C# and .NET define standard protocols for determining the order of one object relative to another. The basic protocols are:

The IComparable interfaces are used by general-purpose sorting algorithms. In the following example, the static Array.Sort method works because System.String implements the IComparable interfaces:

string[] colors = { "Green", "Red", "Blue" };
Array.Sort (colors);
foreach (string c in colors) Console.Write (c + " ");   // Blue Green Red

The < and > operators are more specialized, and they are intended mostly for numeric types. Because they are statically resolved, they can translate to highly efficient bytecode, suitable for computationally intensive algorithms.