Carl Karsten wrote:
for those of you that are wondering about this nuttyness: VFP is a dBase derivative. In there early days, there was no support for Null. But a side effect of adding a row but not storing values to it was empty fields. the best example is a date. dates are stored on disk as a string "YYYYMMDD" and in the case of an empty date: " ". Same with numbers: N(6,2) would store 3.14 as " 3.14" and an empty number was " ". Then they added Null support, but instead of using this empty state, they added a flag, so now a field could be Null, Blank or have a value. which was a mistake, but here we are.
Thanks for the clarification, Carl.
For D/T I am not sure you have a choice. What value would you return for an empty date other than Null?
As it happens, I created custom Date, Time, and DateTime objects so that I could deal with the empty values. I probably just should have returned None from the beginning, but did I mention that this is the project I have learned Python with?
Now that I have them, I'm thinking of keeping and continuing to use them for the empty case... but not sure if that's a great idea, hence my question here.
for Logical I would return False. Mainly because I am pretty sure that because in VFP an empty logical will be treated as .f. anywhere a logical is evaluated.
The test I tried before I left work seems to confirm that (it was just printing).
~Ethan~ _______________________________________________ DB-SIG maillist - DB-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/db-sig
