LINQ Aggregate algorithm explained

It partly depends on which overload you're talking about, but the basic idea is:

• Start with a seed as the "current value"
• Iterate over the sequence. For each value in the sequence:
  • Apply a user-specified function to transform (currentValue, sequenceValue) into (nextValue)
  • Set currentValue = nextValue
• Return the final currentValue

You may find the Aggregate post in my Edulinq series useful - it includes a more detailed description (including the various overloads) and implementations.

One simple example is using Aggregate as an alternative to Count:

// 0 is the seed, and for each item, we effectively increment the current value.
// In this case we can ignore "item" itself.
int count = sequence.Aggregate(0, (current, item) => current + 1);

Or perhaps summing all the lengths of strings in a sequence of strings:

int total = sequence.Aggregate(0, (current, item) => current + item.Length);

Personally I rarely find Aggregate useful - the "tailored" aggregation methods are usually good enough for me.

Super short Aggregate works like fold in Haskell/ML/F#.

Slightly longer .Max(), .Min(), .Sum(), .Average() all iterates over the elements in a sequence and aggregates them using the respective aggregate function. .Aggregate () is generalized aggregator in that it allows the developer to specify the start state (aka seed) and the aggregate function.

I know you asked for a short explaination but I figured as others gave a couple of short answers I figured you would perhaps be interested in a slightly longer one

Long version with code One way to illustrate what does it could be show how you implement Sample Standard Deviation once using foreach and once using .Aggregate. Note: I haven't prioritized performance here so I iterate several times over the colleciton unnecessarily

First a helper function used to create a sum of quadratic distances:

static double SumOfQuadraticDistance (double average, int value, double state)
{
    var diff = (value - average);
    return state + diff * diff;
}

Then Sample Standard Deviation using ForEach:

static double SampleStandardDeviation_ForEach (
    this IEnumerable<int> ints)
{
    var length = ints.Count ();
    if (length < 2)
    {
        return 0.0;
    }

    const double seed = 0.0;
    var average = ints.Average ();

    var state = seed;
    foreach (var value in ints)
    {
        state = SumOfQuadraticDistance (average, value, state);
    }
    var sumOfQuadraticDistance = state;

    return Math.Sqrt (sumOfQuadraticDistance / (length - 1));
}

Then once using .Aggregate:

static double SampleStandardDeviation_Aggregate (
    this IEnumerable<int> ints)
{
    var length = ints.Count ();
    if (length < 2)
    {
        return 0.0;
    }

    const double see