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[nycphp-talk] Need help understanding NULL

David Mintz vtbludgeon at gmail.com
Fri Sep 4 10:14:08 EDT 2009


On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:08 AM, <sequethin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Late to this party,
>

me too, but:

the way I think of it is, NULL simply means no value at all. 0 and boolean
false and '' are values, for sure; NULL is, um, null. As for concrete
examples, in baseball there are those two-row tables -- one for the away and
one for the home team -- with columns for each of the nine innings. Before
the game begins, what are the values in each of those fields?

Problems can arise in PHP because if you var_dump($foo) and it's NULL, is
that because it was never set, or because it was explicitly set to NULL? Or
is it because you are referring to global that's out of scope because you're
inside a function? PHP doesn't care because it's NULL in either case. If you
have an $object and accidently lapse into French and type
$objet->doSomething(), your program will puke because $objet is likewise
NULL. (Assuming for the sake of the example that you haven't actually
assigned an object to $objet)


As for Javascript, the days of "I hate it" are behind us. You gotta do it,
like it or not, in this brave new web 2.0 world. Fortunately we have an
ample selection of quality frameworks to choose from, all of which,
apparently, have peculiarities sufficiently irksome to some programmer,
whose Hubris and Impatience greatly exceed her or his Laziness, so that s?he
will write yet another one, and cast of characters grows larger. I'm a
humble consumer, myself, and I'm liking JQuery.


-- 
David Mintz
http://davidmintz.org/

The subtle source is clear and bright
The tributary streams flow through the darkness
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