Is that a P&C specific concern or one that should better be covered in WebIDL? -- Thomas Roessler, W3C <[email protected]>
On 2 Feb 2010, at 13:29, Marcos Caceres wrote: > Hi, > I had a discussion with an implementer who was a bit confused about the > concept of "null" in the specification. The problem is that I kinda wrote the > spec as if it was to be implemented in Java or JavaScript. This has resulted > in confusion wrt how "null" is to be interpreted in languages that don't have > that concept/data type. > > So, in an effort to clarify that, I've added the following to Processing > Rules section of P&C: > > [[ > In the following algorithms, the concept of null is used as a special symbol > to indicate that a variable has no data associated with it. For example, "let > x be null" or "if y is empty, then return null". > > Note: Although ECMAScript and Java support null as a native value type, there > are some programming languages that have no notion of null or where null is > problematic (e.g. C++). For those languages, it is OK for an implementation > to substitute the null for some other value or symbol (or for nothing at > all). For example, it is ok to have the value 0 represent null for the height > of a widget as the height of a widget is defined as a non-negative integer > greater than 0. In such a case, 0 would behave as if it is null. > ]] > > I don't have much experience programming in anything but Java and ECMAScript > (why would anyone program in something else?!;)), so please let me know if it > makes sense or if it could be better defined. > >
