note 72170 deleted from language.types.null by nlopess

Note Submitter: Stephen ---- PHP's NULL value seems to be a bit of a fraud. As somebody has already noted, the following will throw a "variable not defined" error: print ((is_null($blah_blah)) ? 'true' : 'false'); What wasn't noted earlier is that this should not be happening. As per the definition above, a variable is considered to be NULL if it is not defined. So by definition, is_null should not be throwing "variable not defined" errors. The same thing will happen with both equality and identity operators: print (($blah_blah == NULL) ? 'true' : 'false'); print (($blah_blah === NULL) ? 'true' : 'false'); Both these throw the same error. So in sum it seems that NULL doesn't *actually* mean NULL in PHP. It is simply a separate type that means something different from the other types, but behaves in the same way as the other types. I consider this to be a significant shortcoming in the PHP language. Hopefully PHP will adopt the MySQL-style NULL value behavior in the future.