Talk:Null

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The article 'nil' redirects to this article ('null'). As far as I know, nil stands for 'not in list'. That information should be available for someone wanting to read about 'nil'. Ask Google about 'nil "not in list"'. --DanielJanzon 10:40, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

In Pascal, a "null" pointer is called "nil". It is derived from Latin "nihil", meaning "nothing". Probably "not in list" is a backronym Bogdan | Talk 10:43, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I removed much of the "science fiction" section. The term "null space" means different things to different authors, and does not always match up with the finely detailed description given here. Sometimes it's a space next to subspace/hyperspace, sometimes it's a synonym for them. So to be accurate, any discussion of "null space" either has to be vague enough to cover the whole genre, or mention which specific author's works it's talking about. In any case, a discussion of the full range of possible meanings of "null space" would be better placed in the Hyperspace (science fiction) article. :-) --209.108.217.226 21:35, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Undoing a page

I have to put the Disambig page back here again which was wholly deleted by User:Woodstone.

It is conventional in Wikipedia that if anyone wishes to do a major change should place a comment in Talk page. Not to just tell: "That was a completely absurd edit"!.

--Sepand 04:48, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually, I'd say that your splitting of the article into multiple pages was a pretty big edit in itself. True, it was suggested by a user, but it was not discussed at all. Anybody can slap that sign on the page. Even if nobody's expressed opposition, it's still a good idea to make a "yeah, let's do this" message on Talk, and wait a while before moving forward with changes.
So let's discuss it now. I'm not sure it was a good idea to give every little section its own page. The math/stat definitions don't have any forseeable growth, so they should probably have stayed on the disambig page. - mako 05:44, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

You are true. I should had left this discussion before. About the page:

I think the Null term is itself a very general term. I have splited this by having these points in my mind:

  1. The first section in previous merged page contained long etymological concerns which I placed a Wikinioray tag and due to their multitude and multi-lingual form and my ignorance of Wikitionary format, I moved them to Wikitionary:Null:Talk.
  2. I found that Statistics section was repetition of the previously created article Null Hypothesis. So I deleted that section.
  3. I do not think that Null_(Computer) contents be related to Null_(Physics) and Null_(Physics) is potential for expansion furthur more.
  4. Of course placing Null_result in this disambig page seems unnecessary cause it is again repetition of the previous Null article. But I leaved it to be concerned. Note that I changed Null_result's split tag to merge tag.
  5. The pages KK Null and Null_cipher was present and I just linked this page to them.
  6. I moved the material in Cryptography section which was not coinciding with Null_cipher in that of Null_cipher.
  7. As a result you see 9 items in this disambig page and I have just created three new articles: Null_(Computer), Null_(Physics) and Null_(Mathematics) which I again insist that they are not co-related concepts.

--Sepand 06:18, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Clearly KK Null and n-u-l-l are really different concepts from the remainder and could have been disambiguated in a leading section.
However, all the other ones have the same basic meaning, applied to different fields. They are all (except perhaps the null hypothesis) ugly stubs. The one Null result is a duplication of several of the other ones.
So I maintain that the article before split was an informative overview of the different ways of looking at the "null" concept. After split it is a tiresome and not very systematic list pointing to very tiny articles. The fun of reading the orginal article is completely lost by this dissection.
−Woodstone 10:09, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

There seems to have been no development on any of the stubs created by the massive split. So I will shortly merge back for the reasons stated above. −Woodstone 16:44, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] strange entries

both of the following entries seem strange to me:

  • n-u-l-l, a manga scanlation website
  • Null, in science fiction null space is sometimes a dimension or space related to subspace.

The first one, since the liked page does not exist and I could not backtrace the appearence of n-u-l-l in the article's history (seemed to appear when the disambig page was created from the "full content" page)

The second one, since the boldface Null differs much from all other entries, and since the "subspace" link does not point to a page named subspace, and there is no "subspace" section there, and there is absolutely no reference to null there.— MFH:Talk 17:05, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Agreed; removed the null space entry. ~ PseudoSudo 23:49, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Removed the n-u-l-l entry; it used to point to Null Website which was AfD'd for non-notability. ~ PseudoSudo 00:01, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] /dev/null

I added /dev/null to the disambig list; someone going to this page looking for that entry wouldn't necessarily think to go through "Null, a special value in computer programming." to get there. ~ PseudoSudo 23:55, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] German (and other languages)

I reverted a recent edit that added "the german word for 'zero'" to the list of links. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and especially not a German-English one. Perhaps the German meaning (and other meanings in other languages) should be added to the Wiktionary entry instead.

--BlckKnght 14:38, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Structure

Does anybody else think that this page should be structured? e.g., there could be a category for nulls relating to computers having SQL and /dev/null as subpoints. --Whiteknox 16:36, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] In a C language...

It is defined in C language, "# define NULL 0". Because NULL means nothing. --Naohiro19 15:40, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

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