Can all 'for' loops be replaced with a LINQ statement?

Question

Is it possible to write the following 'foreach' as a LINQ statement, and I guess the more general question can any for loop be replaced by a LINQ statement.

I'm not interested in any potential performance cost just the potential of using declarative approaches in what is traditionally imperative code.

    private static string SomeMethod()
    {
        if (ListOfResources .Count == 0)
            return string.Empty;

        var sb = new StringBuilder();
        foreach (var resource in ListOfResources )
        {
            if (sb.Length != 0)
                sb.Append(", ");

            sb.Append(resource.Id);
        }

        return sb.ToString();
    }

Cheers

AWC

Answer 1

Sure. Heck, you can replace arithmetic with LINQ queries. But you shouldn't.

The purpose of a query expression is to represent a query operation. The purpose of a "for" loop is to iterate over a particular statement so as to have its side-effects executed multiple times. Those are frequently very different. I encourage replacing loops whose purpose is merely to query data with higher-level constructs that more clearly query the data. I strongly discourage replacing side-effect-generating code with query comprehensions, though doing so is possible.