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[nycphp-talk] Need help understanding NULL

Kristina D. H. Anderson ka at kacomputerconsulting.com
Fri Sep 4 12:08:14 EDT 2009


References to baseball AND the Tao in a PHP post about NULL!  Love it!!

Kristina

PS Also a jQuery fan here.


> 
> 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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