GHashTable suggestions

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

this might come a little late, but it's something I just stumpled
across when looking at the GHashTable API. IMHO it would be very
convenient if the function

        gboolean 
        g_hash_table_remove (GHashTable    *hash_table,
                             gconstpointer  key);

would instead return the removed value. Thus one could avoid to do
two lookups when removing a value from a GHashTable. With the 
current API you have to

        value = g_hash_table_lookup (hash, key);
        g_free (value)  /*  or unref or whatever  */ 
        g_hash_table_remove (hash, key);

which could become

        g_free (g_hash_table_remove (hash, key));


The same applies to g_hash_table_insert(). I must admit that it 
looks strange, but it would actually be useful if it would return
the previous value in the case the key already existed in the 
GHashTable and it's value was replaced by the new one. The obvious 
advantage is that one could write

        g_free (g_hash_table_insert (hash, key, value)); 

instead of

        g_free (g_hash_table_lookup (hash, key);
	g_hash_table_insert (hash, key, value);


Alternatively there could be new functions called for example

        gboolean g_hash_table_remove_and_destroy (hash, key);
        gboolean g_hash_table_replace (hash, key, value);

but this could only work if there was a destroy function that could
be registered with the GHashTable.


If you find any of these ideas useful and worth to be included with 
glib, please let me know and I will provide a patch.


Salut, Sven