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.<p>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 string. This has nothing to do with null being a reserved word in many languages, I'll bet the forms that aren't accepting 'null' aren't accepting 'none' or 'empty' either.
Reminds me of the time we ordered our high school football jerseys. We filled out a form listing the requested size and spelling of our last name to be printed on the back of our jersey. A couple of weeks later, all the jerseys were delivered and we excitedly opened up the packing boxes to hand them out. Imaging the surprise and ensuing hilarity when our good friend, Marshall Blank's jersey came out of the box with no name printed on it whatsoever.
My old Manager's last name is Blank. The sad thing, given blank isnt a reserved word at all, is he has the same problem. I think its EventBright or Ticketmaster, i forget, but one of those sites wont accept "Blank" as his last name, literally with the message of "Last name can not be blank" ...
I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian.<p>This post is a classic on various name issues: <a href="http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...</a>
One of my LLCs is named "Null Ventures LLC". I sometimes get things via snail mail that are addressed in interesting ways. The most common is simply "<space>Ventures LLC". Unlike the author, I've never had issues (AFAIK, anyways) receiving e-mail to the domain.
previous discussion: Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426315" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426315</a>
Reminds me of running into this bug [1] at work that caused a few minutes of head scratching. Couldn't make any changes to a user's profile as their surname contained eval.<p>[1] <a href="https://quickview.cloudapps.cisco.com/quickview/bug/CSCut08386" rel="nofollow">https://quickview.cloudapps.cisco.com/quickview/bug/CSCut083...</a>
I don't get what's happening at the low-level for this to be a problem.<p>It seems like you'd have to do something pretty stupid at the coding level to introduce a problem with "Null" <i>by mistake</i>. I'm sure it happens, but not more of an occasional issue.<p>My best guess is that there are common old databases that did not have a first class null type where it was common practice to use the string "NULL" for that purpose. And that companies that have these old systems are proactively filtering user input to prevent causing these old system to choke... It sounds like the filter is case-insensitive, though, which would be too aggressive for the case I'm thinking of. Maybe they are (mis)using a bad word filter for this, which would tend to be aggressive.
I'm trying to think how this would be a problem and it wouldn't directly be a issue created by company but could be a issue in companies we deal with passing around large databases of different types on people in America. It's common we have to deal with a pipe delimited set of large data and after loading it I'm sure my boss could see last name null in MySQL and go "let's delete all "null" names.
what languages don't distinguish between literal null and a string with content "null".<p>More importantly, who the fuck used such monstrosities?