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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
by 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 agoI 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.