On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 5:11 PM, John McKown <john.archie.mckown at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not a developer. So I guess that it's my ignorance as to why a program > would be confused by the string value of "null" or any variant thereof. Consider this XML snippet, which very likely passes through some of the apps Mr. Null has been processed by (or failed to be processed by, as the case may be): <value>Null</value> i've seen careless apps which would consider that to be a "program NULL" as opposed to the string "Null". I do understand looking for a string of length 0. > depending on the language/environment, an empty string is of type _string_ with a length of 0, whereas null is of a separate type called null. More commonly, null/NULL is generic placeholder which can be used together with references of any concrete type, but (when used with a string-typed reference) never has a length property (whereas an empty string does). In type-flexible languages, one typically cannot have a "null string," but instead can have _either_ a string or a null value. In C++, one can have a string-typed pointer to NULL, which is basically (because it keeps its data type) a "null string," but still doesn't have a length (which is subtly different than having a length of 0, even though the semantics are identical for many purposes). i can see why some systems have a problem with "Null," but in order to have such problems i would argue that someone wasn't paying attention in the design and/or implementation. That poor guy. -- ----- stephan beal http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/ http://gplus.to/sgbeal "Freedom is sloppy. But since tyranny's the only guaranteed byproduct of those who insist on a perfect world, freedom will have to do." -- Bigby Wolf
