Making a Count that takes into consideration null check - What should i call it? SafeCount?

    public static int SafeCount<T>(this IList list开发者_运维知识库)
    {
        return list != null ? list.Count : 0;
    }

What I want to ask is what should I call this method? SafeCount? NullSafeCount?

Can you come up with something more short yet non-ambigous?

To align with other methods in the framework I would call it GetCountOrDefault or possible CountOrDefault. Similar methods from which I would look to for predecence.

• Enumerable.FirstOrDefault
• Enumerable.SingleOrDefault
• Enumerable.LastOrDefault
• Enumerable.ElementAtOrDefault
• Nullable.GetValueOrDefault

Another option is to encode the ambiguity in the return type instead of the method name by having it return a int? instead of an int.

public static int? GetCount(this IList list) { 
  return list != null ? (int?)list.Count : null;
}

It might just be linq's influence on me, but I would be tempted to call it 'CountOrDefault'. Not really shorter though...

(side note: Why IList and not IEnumerable? Just curious)