I can't give immediate examples, but I suspect there are cases where the first would return true
, but the second return false
. Two values maybe equal in terms of sort order, while still being distinct even under case-ignoring rules. For example, one culture may decide not to treat accents as important while sorting, but still view two strings differing only in accented characters as unequal. (Or it's possible that the reverse may be true - that two strings may be considered equal, but one comes logically before the other.)
If you're basically interested in the sort order rather than equality, then using Compare
makes sense. It also potentially makes sense if the code is going to be translated - e.g. for LINQ - and that overload of Compare
is supported but that overload of Equals
isn't.
I'll try to come up with an example where they differ. I would certainly say it's rare. EDIT: No luck so far, having tried accents, Eszet, Turkish "I" handling, and different kinds of spaces. That's a long way from saying it cant happen though.