Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers

Re:Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers by avz on Monday September 05, 2016 @02:59AM (#12428604)

> Since the empty String is a valid String, and Strinfg.valueOf() also returns a String, what other behavior would you ever imagine being sane or possible?

IMHO, String.valueOf() throwing NPE upon encountering a null reference would be both sane and possible.

Unfortunately, it does indeed appear that it returns "null" instead [1].

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.h...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers by samuellb on Monday September 05, 2016 @04:19AM (#12428876)

On the other hand, it's quite convenient to not have to do null checks in debug messages. Compare:

log.trace("doStuff(" + obj1 + ", " + obj2 + ")");

to this:

log.trace("doStuff(" + (obj1 != null ? obj1 : "null") + ", " + (obj2 != null ? obj2 : "null") + ")");

The second one is IMHO quite hard to read, even in this short example (and code readability is important when you do code reviews)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers by tomtomtom777 on Monday September 05, 2016 @04:53AM (#12428991)

That is why you should use string formatting instead of concatenation.

For string formatting, rendering "null" (or "") makes sense; for coercion not.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers by richardwhiuk on Monday September 05, 2016 @06:16AM (#12429271)

That just resolves into everyone always doing formatting, and never doing concatenation, which yields the same problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]