5 ms·

You mean like the way the natural numbers can be built from Church numerals? Are you saying that nothing exists, or that there can be no true knowledge of reali

• posterboy 8y ago
  I mean, "ex falso quodlibet" - from wrong (assumptions) follow arbitrary (conclusions). "Zero is ..." is a contradiction, whatever predicate follows it. In CS, null is false, indeed. Hence I'd rather use at least one underspecified symbol, say 1, instead of to construct the initial element of sets.
  • perl4ever 8y ago
    Isn't null normally neither true nor false? Perhaps I've spent too much time writing SQL. Null = True is false Null = False is false
    • posterboy 8y ago
      In many algol like languages 0 == false == null, and all other numbers are equivalent to true. "Null" is e.g. German for zero, from Latin nullus, from ne (“not”) + ūllus (“any”), from an older ūnus (“one”). This is way more interesting though. It seems that words for zero are related to the sun (an empty, shining sky, also consider the form), to grain, core, again by the form (zero was also drawn just as a dot, historically), and to root, which would explain why the zeros of a polynomial are also called the roots.
      • perl4ever 8y ago
        I know, I learned BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, and Ada before SQL and Perl. But see the way Ruby does it: "only nil (Ruby's null value) and a special false object are false, all else (including the integer 0 and empty arrays) is true" vs Perl: "The number 0, the strings "0" and "", the empty list (), and the special value undef evaluate to false. All else evaluates to true" The SQL way seems less like an arbitrary mess to me.