On 2015/11/08 6:11 PM, John McKown 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. I > do understand looking for a string of length 0. If I were to want a special > name for Some purpose, I'd likely use xyzzy. I thought of plugh as well, > but a search turned up a article by a Mike Plugh.
Not your ignorance at all - there should never be a confusion if proper diligence was applied (the kind everybody learns in stage 1 of any education in programming). The reason mr. Null has any discomfort is due to poor system design. SQL engines of any sort (for instance) have no problem whatsoever with strings containing the value "Null" or "null" or some such. In other data formats, such as JSON etc. it is impossible to mistake the name Null for the value null. The entire problem can be summed up in two words: Lazy devs.
