Saturday 5 September 2015

Null coming to a ColdFusion near you?

G'day:
Am at the pub watching England in the process of handing Ireland their arses to them, which is... disappointing. Still: Ireland's still in the game, and there's 40min left.

Anyway, I spotted this status change to a ticket I raise  in the Adobe bugbase this morning:

Null


[Just] Sort it out[...]. Break any backwards compat you need to to do this. Just make it work. Null is a real thing, stop pretending it isn't or than an empty string is a suitable facsimile of it.

And... blimey... they've only gone and changed the status of the ticket to "To Fix" (admittedly with a sub-status of "Investigate".

About bloody time.

Now... they might investigate and decide to "Close/NeverFix/CantBeArsed" so what you - the ColdFusion community - need to do is go make yer voice heard, and vote and or comment on that ticket. Remind Adobe that lack of the formal concept of null in the language is a right pain in the arse, and wastes a lot of our time. It might have made sense to omit this back when ColdFusion was first release back in the 90s an all it was for was looping over record sets and displaying them, but our industry has moved on and the expectations on CFML devs now is to write applications not "My Web Site", so the kind of code we're writing has changed, and we need these "more complex" (scowl) constructs.

Null is pretty fundamental to... well... programming.

One thing Adobe must do is look at how Lucee has implemented this, and make sure the implementation is congruent. I can't see how it wouldn't be, but... still.

Anyway, ColdFusioners.... go let Adobe know this is important to you.

Back to watching the second half of this "friendly"(*) between England and Ireland.

--
Adam

(*) it's not friendly.