On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 05:05:46AM -0700, Brighten Godfrey wrote:
> Suppose you are given a data structure, and you want to retrive one  
> element -- any one element.  Sounds simple... and it is, if you have  
> a list (List.hd list) or an array (arr.(0)).  But how about a  
> hashtable, if we don't know a priori any of the keys in the hashtable?

It's very unclear what you're trying to do.

For List and Array those methods won't work if the data structure is
empty, but I guess that's expected.  Hashtbl isn't designed with the
"get an/any element" usage in mind -- your loop/exception is probably
the best way given that you've made a poor choice of data structure in
the first place.  But this still comes back to the question, what are
you trying to do?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat