On 8 Nov 2015, at 4:11pm, John McKown <john.archie.mckown at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not a developer. So I guess that it's my ignorance as to why a program > would be confused by the string value of "null" or any variant thereof. NULL has a special meaning in SQL and some other database languages. Depending on what the programmer wanted at the time it means something like "Value unknown" or "No such value" or "Not applicable". All such programs are meant to keep an extremely clear distinction between these two: surname = "Null" surname = NULL But fast, lazy, untested programs, especially cases where a working setup is moved to another language or another platform by someone who doesn't understand picky details of the original tend to mess this up. Much more often than you'd think. Many languages have documentation specifically on the problems of handling NULLs. Here's part of SQLite's: <https://www.sqlite.org/nulls.html> Simon.
