Shakespeare wrote:
> "Martin T." <0xCDCDCDCD_at_gmx.at> schreef in bericht
> news:46cd966d$0$1347$834e42db_at_reader.greatnowhere.com...
>> William Robertson wrote:
>>> On Aug 22, 7:22 pm, "Paul Linehan" <plinehan__A_at_T__yahoo__D.OT__COM>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Mark D Powell wrote:
>>>>> I have always had difficulty with the concept that an empty string
>>>>> should not be considered a NULL value to begin with. What does an
>>>>> empty string hold?
>>>> Take an ex-girlfriend of mine, she had a child in the States
>>>> and *_specifically_* didn't give her (the child) a middle name.
>>>>
>>>> So, Middle_Initial is blank '' - and not NULL, since it is a
>>>> known quantity - as Donald Rumsfeld might say, a "known unknown".
>>>>
>>>> NULLs are unknown unknowns. Despite Mr. Rumsfeld's verbal
>>>> gymnastics, there is no such thing as an unknown known.
>>>>
>>>> You concatenate blank with a string, and you simply get the string
>>>> back - do the same with NULL and you get NULL.
>>>>
>>>> I'd say NULLs are readily distinguishable from blank strings.
>>>>
>>>> Paul...
>>> (...)
>>>
>>> Oracle treats nulls as empty strings when concatenating, often leading
>>> to cries of inconsistency in this sort of debate, but it is the
>>> overwhelmingly more useful behaviour.
>>>
>> Yeah. And Length('') == NULL which is bloody awful.
>> Imho, Oracle just messed up on varchar2 and NULL. (from a practical, not a
>> philosophical point of view)
>>
>> br,
>> Martin
>
> Much ado about nothing (or null or '' or "").
>
> Even worse: in Dutch 0 (zero) is called "nul" and pronounced (almost) like
> null.....
>
> Shakespeare
>
And in German it's exactly the same word: zero(en) = Null(de)
It really gets ugly when you try to discuss this face to face as it's a
constant confusion as to what you're talking about :-)
Received on Fri Aug 24 2007 - 00:39:10 CDT
