291–300 of 310 posts
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I’m still convinced unit tests are a Santa clause type situation where it takes. While to figure out it’s really just a story told to naïve juniors
I'm very slow for some reason. Can somebody please ELI5 this statement?
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No, but it also doesn't let you store null in a string variable. Well... it does, but that would just be an empty string.
In C, and many other languages at that, strings are just arrays of bytes. So you absolutely could store null in a string... It is even a valid ascii and UTF character. Now most string handling functions treat it as the end of a string in C but that is only by convention. How you would display null to a user is a different story all together but representing it in a string is not an unsolved programming problem, gener…
Since in C strings are quasi-arrays and arrays are quasi-pointers there is probably a way to use a null pointer, but this would be a local convention for getting around C's lack of native support for null values. You couldn't expect it to be supported by utilities or libraries.
my legal last name has been "Null" for a bit over half a year, and I've had no problems. before changing it, I asked a friend whose legal last name had been "Null" for a couple years. it hadn't had any issues. this article (and the one about the British guy) is overblown.
Interesting. Why change it to "Null"?
The funny thing is, the real thing that's caused me problems is that I changed from a name with a middle name to one without. Some systems did not handle this transition well. PATCH instead of PUT, or something.
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Hey, that's also relevant to me! I've checked my local laws, and where I live, your legal name is the one you consistently present yourself as. If you're Joe Frank Smith, and you go by Frank everywhere, that's your legal name . I've gotten so tired of having this argument. Inevitably some clerk will insist on calling me by my first name, "you know, your legal name ". No. My middle name is my legal name. It's what my…
Curious, if you don't like it why not change it? Then you can be Frank Smith all the time.
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Interesting. Why change it to "Null"?
I needed to change my legal name because my existing one was unavoidable and distressing (trans reasons). I have, have had, and will have too many names to privilege one as "most correct." I've been trans too long to believe government names are "real" anyways, and I also didn't want the association with my birth family anymore. so I wanted an "empty" legal name, something that nobody calls me (but I won't be upset w…
I don't think there is such a thing as a "government name". There is a concept of "legal name" which seems to be just whatever name is on your ID. Anyone can change their name on a whim, the only issue is getting that changed on important/vital documents (as well as companies to recognize the name change, for which they have policies of requiring legal documents). There is a public interest in not letting people "change" their names too easily/often as that is a common way for criminals to evade.
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To be fair, Esperanto is, as far as I can tell, not very widely used. The letter ĝ mostly returns Esperanto results. Using that letter in a place where others may need to communicate or type the letter would be a severe burden on almost anyone else you interact with, outside of Esperanto communities. I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hop…
> as far as I can tell, not very widely used Well, it's the most widely spoken international language, spoken in over a hundred countries, by an estimated 2-5M people. There's a rich literature (probably 30-50K books), vibrant music scene, and support in open source software (Linux, Firefox, Google products) is usually pretty good. But the issue is not how widely Esperanto, or any other language, is spoken. If you as…
Maybe I didn't communicate my thoughts clearly - the reason I call it a "severe burden" is because people won't know how to type it or how to pronounce it. I doubt many people have the ability to type the letter, and would have to copy-paste it. Even on Mac, where most diacritical characters are an opt+key away, the "ˆ" does not apply to the letter "g", resulting in "ˆg". "ĝ" would need to be treated the same as, for example, "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" - where users generally google it and then copy-paste it. Sure, there are ways to allow for easier retrieval (ex. I have "@shrug" set up to make the shrug), but most people will very rarely encounter "ĝ" or similar, and won't have a shortcut set up.
One place I worked, customers (usually merchants) sent product data through an API my team managed. I was working on a data validation project and ran across an item that was getting rejected. One of the fields customers can set is tags. The item was a t-shirt with a joke about null pointer exceptions, so someone set tags to include ["null", "pointer", "exception"]. Our parser coerced it to null, then returned an err…
Ah yes, automatic type coercion. A literal “WTF were you thinking” feature of JavaScript. So much pain for so little gain.
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Bob Matt Derrick once told me of a facility whose maintenance supervisor was named Stuart Pedaso and he nearly had an aneurism from laughter. Secretary there didn't get it.
You know, it took me ages to finally get this… first three letters of first name plus first three letters of surname. Does that mean I’m his login? (And the last three letters of his surname sound a bit like another word, but adding that to his login as well ruins my dad joke.)
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I revisited this discussion after 3h and now I'm even more terrified, because most (if not all) replies totally miss the point. Again: no computer system should ever interpret anything in the "last name" field. It should always be handled "in gloves", as an opaque value. It's not about typing, it's not about "paying for clear code", it's not about HTTP, I guess it might be about "best practices", but come on — this s…
I agree with you within a single data domain. But is a smart comment buried in there about ETL systems and data exchange where it's pretty easy, and arguably correctly in some cases, to get "null" in an exported field. Then the importing system, again arguable correctly, needs to handle the null case as a true null, not "null." I'm not sure there is a very easy fix for this or an obvious best practice.
"null" is not the same as null. One is an opaque string, the other is a language value. One should NEVER build systems that confuse the two, or allow one to be interpreted as the other.
If you export data, export nulls as nulls, not "nulls". If you import data, NEVER interpret what's inside strings.