I knew a person who's full name was `Mai Null`.
It always made me laugh because "Mai Null" means "never null" in Italian and because he's had plenty of issues due to his family name.
When your last name is Null, nothing works
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Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#12That should be part of every test suite
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#13Who's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?
People who neither know, nor care, what they’re doing. When you’ve worked with people who are allowed to write code that interfaces with databases for more than about two weeks, you may be dismayed to see the large overlap between those two groups.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#14For many years, my mother's proper legal name on her birth certificate was the empty string. This wasn't usually a problem before computers as she'd go by a given name instead, even on government paperwork. She started having issues with systems being unable to process her information in the late 90s and early 2000s. Background checks would fail, passports couldn't be issued, and so on. She eventually had it changed, but I imagine it'd be even worse now.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#15Who's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?
Plenty of systems represent all values as strings, and "null" is the obvious (although probably not the best) way to represent a null value as a string.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#16I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us.
It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and request a second account... there was always a bit of contention between us about who got the 'proper' username and who got the disambiguated one!
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#17Who's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?
Any time "$var" is interpolated without check into an INSERT, and any maintainer finds it easier to just check for null as a string rather than ask a DB admin or committee to update the DB after a lot of red tape and risk assessment. So... very often.
Guess I’ll change my name to ‘;drop table customers then ;)
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#18https://xkcd.com/327/
Little Bobby Tables is all grown up and has had their first kid, Ignore All Previous Instructions
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#19Who's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?
There’s a few condescending answers here. You will find this more common in weakly typed languages like PHP and VB and maaaaaybe JavaScript, where null == “null” will probably evaluate to true.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#20For many years, my mother's proper legal name on her birth certificate was the empty string. This wasn't usually a problem before computers as she'd go by a given name instead, even on government paperwork. She started having issues with systems being unable to process her information in the late 90s and early 2000s. Background checks would fail, passports couldn't be issued, and so on. She eventually had it changed,…
There must be an interesting backstory here. Did her parents deliberately not name her? Did they forget?