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Dan Horrigan's Blog:
The Value of Null
Apr 19, 2011 @ 15:51:18

Dan Horrigan has a new post to his blog talking about the value of null - a quick summary about when and where null should be used. Null's a value too, after all...

Let me start off by saying this article is about PHP and PHP alone. Other languages handle this sort of thing differently (and better). In PHP many people (and a few frameworks) return FALSE from methods when the requested value does not exist. However, I am here to tell you that if you do this, you are doing it wrong. Plain and Simple.

In his opinion, "false" is definitely not the same thing as "null" because "null" is technically the absence of a value, not a "not true" value like "false" is. He illustrates with a simple use case of a class that has methods returning various values.

tagged: value null opinion false return

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