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My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

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Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#61

Post by pc86 »

0xffff2 wrote: post #40
halfdgvfyjjuc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That character is a backtick not a grave isn't it? Also some cultures use «» as quotes. It's a big world.

Is there a difference? I think those are both words for the same character.

It's a backtick when by itself, grave when it's an accent over another character.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#62

Post by incongruity »

ajuc wrote: post #60
incongruity wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but that operator is implicitly casting the null object to a string type – it has to, in a strict sense... some other languages would raise an error (and many would do the same as Java).

It doesn't have to. null.toString() throws NPE as it should. I would expect "foo" + null to throw NPE as well. BTW there's another "fun" gotcha, when you interface java code and oracle database which consider empty string and null to be the same thing. Depending on how you handle data from database you end up with null, "", or "null" :)

Interesting – I haven't touched Java in years so I'm definitely out of my element with that language, so thank you.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#63

Post by nulagrithom »

jugg1es wrote: post #13
DavidWoof wrote: post #6

I've been programming for over a quarter century, and I feel pretty confident that I've never written anything that could confuse 'null' with NULL. I can't even think of a language that would let you easily do this. If web forms aren't accepting NULL, then somebody probably specifically programmed the word 'null' into a filter of disallowed entries. Probably to stop clerks from entering the word 'null' to mean empty…

Javascript lets you do it if you use the equality (==) instead of the identity (===).. i think.

Nope. Not even JavaScript screws this one up. You've got to be doing something stupid with strings to get tripped up by "Null".

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#65

Post by pjungwir »

charlieo88 wrote: post #22
tyingq wrote: post #2

I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian. This post is a classic on various name issues: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

It's not always a computer problem. I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an apostrophe ('), and whatever the hell you call the character under the tilde (`). I kid, it's the grave.

If you really want some fun, try explaining to people the difference between modern Greek tonos (e.g. ή, Unicode 03ae) and ancient Greek oxia (e.g. ή, Unicode 1f75). Or in UTF-8:

    paul@tal:~$ od --format=x1z tmp/tonos-oxia
    0000000 74 6f 6e 6f 73 3a 20 ce ae 0a 6f 78 69 61 3a 20  >tonos: ...oxia:  ....
It's super fun when you are the only tech person in a Classics grad program and everyone else is turning in papers that look like ransom notes, because every fourth vowel has a different x-height from all the other letters. :-)

Here are the two Unicode ranges (PDF):

modern Greek: http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf

ancient Greek: http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf

Then again, try explaining to tech people the difference between ή and ἠ and how you can get ἤ or ᾔ. :-)

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#68

Post by jameshart »

DavidWoof wrote: post #6

I've been programming for over a quarter century, and I feel pretty confident that I've never written anything that could confuse 'null' with NULL. I can't even think of a language that would let you easily do this. If web forms aren't accepting NULL, then somebody probably specifically programmed the word 'null' into a filter of disallowed entries. Probably to stop clerks from entering the word 'null' to mean empty…

Often it'll be compatibility with some upstream legacy system which exposes data as CSV or tab delimited, and outputs data like this:

   First,Middle,Last
   Alice,Q,Foo
   Bob,NULL,Bar
In a world like that, some code got written in the wrong tier to output

   value.toUpper() == "NULL" ? "" : value
and you wind up with a web form that can't roundtrip a name that contains the word 'null'.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#70

Post by Asooka »

ajuc wrote: post #60
incongruity wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but that operator is implicitly casting the null object to a string type – it has to, in a strict sense... some other languages would raise an error (and many would do the same as Java).

It doesn't have to. null.toString() throws NPE as it should. I would expect "foo" + null to throw NPE as well. BTW there's another "fun" gotcha, when you interface java code and oracle database which consider empty string and null to be the same thing. Depending on how you handle data from database you end up with null, "", or "null" :)

String.valueOf(null) returns "null" though, and that is what "foo" + null uses. I can understand why it would be surprising if you thought it used .toString, but it's clearly listed in the standard.
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