Data.HashTable and duplicate keys

Einar Karttunen ekarttun at cs.helsinki.fi
Mon Sep 27 10:52:02 EDT 2004


Hello

I recently noticed that Data.HashTable silently
accepts duplicate keys and keeps all the values.
This is very counterintuitive from the interface
and makes updating a hashtable quite tedious 
(lookup + delete + insert). 

Mentioning the feature in the documentation and 
providing an update function would be very nice.
e.g.  update :: HashTable k v -> k -> (v -> v) -> IO Bool or
update :: HashTable k v -> k -> (v -> (v, w)) -> IO (Maybe w)
with the result marking whether the key was present 
in the hashtable.

On the other hand, if it is a bug I hope it will
be solved quickly. The behaviour can be demonstrated
with

main = do ht <- new (==) hashInt
          insert ht 1 1
          insert ht 1 2
          toList ht >>= print


- Einar Karttunen


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