Our application has a lot of references to a list of i.e. Soccer matches. These soccer matches are 90% of the time sorted (at Date), in some contexts not.

The problem is that it’s often quite important to know if it’s sorted or not. With the consequences of accidentally using an unsorted list causing bugs that you detect late. Now I can prefix every variable like i.e. unsortedMatches and sortedMatches, but that feels very cumbersome in a lot of contexts. Always sorting the list to be sure adds boilerplate code and adds an unnecessary performance penalty.

Is this a common problem? What’s a good solution?