
Null Island - aburan28
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island
======
stickfigure
How does one keep a bouy moored in 5km deep water?

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jagged-chisel
5.1km cables.

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saagarjha
That would allow for quite a bit of drift–a kilometer in each direction.

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jagged-chisel
Three of them, set in different directions.

I’m not saying that’s definitely how it’s done, but it’s how I’d think to do
it with nothing other than my naïve geometric education.

~~~
tjoff
Sounds quite expensive. Not sure if the exact position of the buoy is
considered that important.

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shpx
[https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/)

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galaxyLogic
In Smalltalk it is called nil. nil is an instance of the class
UndefinedObject. In principle you could subclass UndefinedObject. But what is
interesting is that you can add more instance methods to the class
UndefinedObject so you could define the method #isNil for instance which could
be defined also for all objects, but differently

~~~
galaxyLogic
In JavaScript there's a distinction between 'null' and 'undefined'.

You can pick your own semantics for them but I think 'undefined' more or less
means "not known" while null means "known not to exist".

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Vanit
Agreed, but just wanted to add the context that you get undefined values by
trying to access uninitialised things such as out of bounds array elements,
get on a map-like object with a key that's yet to be set, unset properties on
a object, return value of a function that returns void, etc.

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perl4ever
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59437282/can-i-use-
null-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59437282/can-i-use-null-as-
substitution-for-the-value-of-0)

~~~
saagarjha
TL;DR: 0 is always NULL, but NULL is not always 0. Checking or assigning a
pointer to 0 will work but converting NULL to an integer is implementation-
defined.

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perl4ever
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonowon,_British_Columbia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonowon,_British_Columbia)

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masonic
I tried to figure out the what3words value for the location but can't find a
search term it likes.

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duxup
Back when I was a network engineer I liked to imagine that I sent a lot of bad
traffic there.

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joeblau
I was just in Sierra Leone last week and I was telling my brother about this
place.

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perl4ever
Also, null might be the empty string, but when is it ever zero?

Edit: this is a serious question.

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mikestew
You can look at headers:

#define NULL 0 //C++

#define NULL ((void*)0) //C

I think later versions of C++ do something...different, but I’m not up to date
enough to know without looking it up.

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perl4ever
Ok, I wasn't thinking of C, but even so, isn't NULL a pointer value, not an
integer? If you're treating a null pointer as an integer zero, something's
gone very wrong.

Also I think I vaguely remember from discussions about the standards, that a
NULL pointer is not guaranteed to be numerically equal to zero in a standards
compliant compiler.

But yeah, I was thinking of database NULLs.

~~~
boring_twenties
C++03 and earlier stipulate that literal 0 is always the null pointer, whether
it really is on any given hardware or not. C++11 and later deprecate this and
introduce a new keyword `nullptr`.

edit: Also, null is not an empty string. The null character that terminates a
string is unrelated to null pointers.

~~~
saagarjha
Normally I call it the NUL character to distinguish it.

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smitty1e
It would be cooler to call it Fernando Poo[1].

[1]
[https://illuminatus.fandom.com/wiki/Fernando_Poo](https://illuminatus.fandom.com/wiki/Fernando_Poo)

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AlEinstein
Would it though?

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smitty1e
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is all about #Winning.

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speedplane
Each language can define NULL differently. However, because eventually it gets
compiled to machine code, it does indeed need to be represented by some value.
Most languages represent that value as 0, but not always.

It's better to think about NULL as a value plus a type. The value "False" may
be 0 with a boolean type, just as NULL may be 0 with a pointer type.

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pjc50
Null is also the absence of a value altogether.

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speedplane
> Null is also the absence of a value altogether.

In digital logic, there is no such thing as an "absence of a value".
Everything must be represented as bits one way or another. Computers can
certainly represent higher level concepts like an "absence of value", but at
the lowest levels, they must be represented by some bit-stream. Types are
generally the way that higher level concepts can be translated from low-level
bitstreams.

~~~
pjc50
There certainly can be an absence of value if the value isn't there. Think
serialization or sparse arrays. A null may be represented by the absence of
representation.

