Comparing arrays in C#

Question

I am trying to compare two arrays with each other. I tried this code and got the following errors.

static bool ArraysEqual(Array a1, Array a2)
{
    if (a1 == a2)
        return true;

    if (a1 == null || a2 == null)
        return false;

    if (a1.Length != a2.Length)
        return false;

    IList list1 = a1, list2 = a2; //error CS0305: Using the generic type 'System.Collections.Generic.IList<T>' requires '1' type arguments
    for (int i = 0; i < a1.Length; i++)
    {
        if (!Object.Equals(list1[i], list2[i])) //error CS0021: Cannot apply indexing with [] to an expression of type 'IList'(x2)
            return false;
    }
    return true;
}

Why do I get that error? I went for a low-tech solution and did this which works fine, but I need to copy/paste it several times for each type.

static bool ArraysEqual(byte[] a1, byte[] a2)
{
    if (a1 == a2)
        return true;

    if (a1 == null || a2 == null)
        return false;

    if (a1.Length != a2.Length)
        return false;

    for (int i = 0; i < a1.Length; i++)
    {
        if (a1[i] != a2[i])
            return false;
    }
    return true;
}

Answer 1

Providing that you have LINQ available and don't care too much about performance, the easiest thing is the following:

var arraysAreEqual = Enumerable.SequenceEqual(a1, a2);

In fact, it's probably worth checking with Reflector or ILSpy what the SequenceEqual methods actually does, since it may well optimise for the special case of array values anyway!