Quotes like this keep me from sleeping well at night:
> It's not a number definition, but FORMATTING. How do you format nothing in the numerical system? By having it be zero. You don't have NULL dollars in your bank account, do you?
He goes on to say that "this is tax data and has to be precise for tax planning and retirement planning."
Think about that for a minute. A guy claiming to write tax planning software doesn't know the difference between NULL and 0. NULL is not 0. It's NULL. I don't want tax software reporting that I owe "$0" instead of "$badvalue". At a minimum, I want it to throw a giant red error dialog that scares me into double-checking all my inputs.
I think he knows the difference which was why he had a problem with it. But of course the problem is not that some arbitrary function no longer returns him a preferred default value, the problem is that he is sending it garbage to begin with (and he claimed this was used in "thousands" of places...shudder).
> It's not a number definition, but FORMATTING. How do you format nothing in the numerical system? By having it be zero. You don't have NULL dollars in your bank account, do you?
He goes on to say that "this is tax data and has to be precise for tax planning and retirement planning."
Think about that for a minute. A guy claiming to write tax planning software doesn't know the difference between NULL and 0. NULL is not 0. It's NULL. I don't want tax software reporting that I owe "$0" instead of "$badvalue". At a minimum, I want it to throw a giant red error dialog that scares me into double-checking all my inputs.