null++ and its alternatives - NULL as an anti-pattern and some alternatives - stateless functional code
Notepad++ is a great and free text editor with many practical features, such as line-sorting, multi-file and directory find-and-replace, and excellent encoding support. However, programming is hard, and even the noble Notepad++ has been caught off guard in the war on bugs: To NULL or not to NULL... A display full of NULLs is not that desirable, but on the other hand is better than random, uninitialized data, or worse, reading beyond assigned buffers into memory regions containing data this user is not supposed to see. The history of NULL is a controversial one: it was, somewhat like JavaScript, cheap to implement at the time and seemed a good idea. However, notoriously, even the inventor of NULL considers the invention to be a mistake . At first glance, and when used in a very limited scope, NULL seems a sensible construct: a global kind of default 'this is not set' value, that is reliably detectable, as opposed to some random memory garbage. Issues arise when the NU...