4 ms·

> For those of you unwise in the ways of programming, the problem is that “null” is one of those famously “reserved” text strings in many programming languages.

> For those of you unwise in the ways of programming, the problem is that “null” is one of those famously “reserved” text strings in many programming languages. It's not a text string but there are some systems that present it as such and those are the issue. Lazy programming. I remember back working for a financial institution and was told to add some validation to a service that handled adding investment plans to someone's account. The third party service we had to use was using SOAP and NULL values were represented by, you guessed it, simply putting the NULL value in the XML instead of simply omitting the item itself. No amount of protest would make the third party service change the way it worked. "It's always worked like that and we haven't had an issue" and the "if we changed it thousands of our customers would be negatively affected! We can't do that!" were the primary excuses.

colejohnson66 10y ago
Pretty much any language that evaluates this as true: "null" == null
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- eeZi 10y ago
  Python doesn't, and any language that evaluates this as true is crazy. Not even JavaScript does this.
  - eyelidlessness 10y ago
    Not even PHP (it took me about 10 minutes to remember how to PHP before I could test it to be sure).
    - ht85 10y ago
      What's the difference between yourself and a Wordpress plugin? None, doing things in PHP makes you really insecure.
  - deathanatos 10y ago
    It is — sort of — in both. It happens by programmers who are getting superstitious about what the actual type of a variable they have is, and `str()` it. Then they "know" what they're working with. (Alas, the string "None" or "null".)
- city41 10y ago
  The only time I can think of that happening is poorly written SQL queries built out of concatenating strings. And if a system is doing that it has far bigger problems than the last name "Null"
  - ams6110 10y ago
    Even at that, in SQL 'null' and null are definitely not the same thing.
    - city41 10y ago
      Ah yeah, you're right, as even in that situation you'd wrap the name in quotes.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Not C, C++, or D.
- ec109685 10y ago
  This is silly. Not even this is true in many languages null == null
- BillinghamJ 10y ago
  Based on the replies you've received, I'd say that actually there is a very small minority list of languages which do this.

colejohnson66 10y ago

Pretty much any language that evaluates this as true: "null" == null

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
eeZi 10y ago
Python doesn't, and any language that evaluates this as true is crazy. Not even JavaScript does this.
- eyelidlessness 10y ago
  Not even PHP (it took me about 10 minutes to remember how to PHP before I could test it to be sure).
  - ht85 10y ago
    What's the difference between yourself and a Wordpress plugin? None, doing things in PHP makes you really insecure.
- deathanatos 10y ago
  It is — sort of — in both. It happens by programmers who are getting superstitious about what the actual type of a variable they have is, and `str()` it. Then they "know" what they're working with. (Alas, the string "None" or "null".)
city41 10y ago
The only time I can think of that happening is poorly written SQL queries built out of concatenating strings. And if a system is doing that it has far bigger problems than the last name "Null"
- ams6110 10y ago
  Even at that, in SQL 'null' and null are definitely not the same thing.
  - city41 10y ago
    Ah yeah, you're right, as even in that situation you'd wrap the name in quotes.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 10y ago
Not C, C++, or D.
ec109685 10y ago
This is silly. Not even this is true in many languages null == null
BillinghamJ 10y ago
Based on the replies you've received, I'd say that actually there is a very small minority list of languages which do this.