That array_map quandary implemented in other languages

G'day:
A coupla days ago I bleated about array_map [having] a dumb implementation. I had what I thought was an obvious application for array_map in PHP, but it couldn't really accommodate me due to array_map not exposing the array's keys to the callback, and then messing up the keys in the mapped array if one passes array_map more than one array to process.

I needed to remap this:

[
    "2008-11-08" => "Jacinda",
    "1990-10-27" => "Bill",
    "2014-09-20" => "James",
    "1979-05-24" => "Winston"
]

To this:

array(4) {
  '2008-11-08' =>
  class IndexedPerson#3 (2) {
    public $date =>
    string(10) "2008-11-08"
    public $name =>
    string(7) "Jacinda"
  }
  '1990-10-27' =>
  class IndexedPerson#4 (2) {
    public $date =>
    string(10) "1990-10-27"
    public $name =>
    string(4) "Bill"
  }
  '2014-09-20' =>
  class IndexedPerson#5 (2) {
    public $date =>
    string(10) "2014-09-20"
    public $name =>
    string(5) "James"
  }
  '1979-05-24' =>
  class IndexedPerson#6 (2) {
    public $date =>
    string(10) "1979-05-24"
    public $name =>
    string(7) "Winston"
  }
}

Note how the remapped object also contains the original key value. That was the sticking point. Go read the article for more detail and more whining.

OK so my expectations of PHP's array higher order functions are based  on  my experience with JS's and CFML's equivalents. Both of which receive the key as well as the value in all callbacks. I decided to see how other languages achieve the same end, and I'll pop the codee in here for shits 'n' giggles.

---

CFML

Given most of my history is as a CFML dev, that one was easy.

peopleData = ["2008-11-08" = "Jacinda", "1990-10-27" = "Bill", "2014-09-20" = "James", "1979-05-24" = "Winston"]

people = peopleData.map((date, name) => new IndexedPerson(date, name))

people.each((date, person) => echo("#date# => #person#<br>"))

Oh, this presupposes the IndexedPerson component. Due to a shortcoming of how CFML works, components must be declared in a file of their own:

component {

    function init(date, name) {
        this.date = date
        this.name = name
    }

    string function _toString() {
        return "{date:#this.date#; name: #this.name#}"
    }
}

But the key bit is the mapping operation:

people = peopleData.map((date, name) => new IndexedPerson(date, name))

Couldn't be simpler (NB: this is Lucee's CFML implementation, not ColdFusion's which does not yet support arrow functions).

The output is:

2008-11-08 => {date:2008-11-08; name: Jacinda}
1990-10-27 => {date:1990-10-27; name: Bill}
2014-09-20 => {date:2014-09-20; name: James}
1979-05-24 => {date:1979-05-24; name: Winston}

Also note that CFML doesn't have associative arrays, it has structs, so the keys are not ordered. This does not matter here. (Thanks to Zac for correcting me here: CFML does have ordered structs these days).

---

JS

The next language I turned to was JS as that's the I'm next most familiar with. One thing that hadn't occurred to me is that whilst JS's Array implementation has a map method, we need to use an object here as the keys are values not indexes. And whilst I knew Objects didn't have a map method, I didn't know what the equivalent might be.

Well it turns out that there's no real option to use a map here, so I needed to do a reduce on the object's entries, Still: it's pretty terse and obvious:

class IndexedPerson {
    constructor(date, name) {
        this.date = date
        this.name = name
    }
}

let peopleData = {"2008-11-08": "Jacinda", "1990-10-27": "Bill", "2014-09-20": "James", "1979-05-24": "Winston"}

let people = Object.entries(peopleData).reduce(function (people, personData) {
    people.set(personData[0], new IndexedPerson(personData[0], personData[1]))
    return people
}, new Map())

console.log(people)

This returns what we want:

Map {
  '2008-11-08' => IndexedPerson { date: '2008-11-08', name: 'Jacinda' },
  '1990-10-27' => IndexedPerson { date: '1990-10-27', name: 'Bill' },
  '2014-09-20' => IndexedPerson { date: '2014-09-20', name: 'James' },
  '1979-05-24' => IndexedPerson { date: '1979-05-24', name: 'Winston' } }

TBH I think this is a misuse of an object to contain basically an associative array / struct, but so be it. It's the closest analogy to the PHP requirement. I was able to at least return it as a Map, which I think is better. I tried to have the incoming personData as a map, but the Map prototype's equivalent of entries() used above is unhelpful in that it returns an Iterator, and the prototype for Iterator is a bit spartan.

I think it's slightly clumsy I need to access the entries value via array notation instead of some sort of name, but this is minor.

As with all my code, I welcome people showing me how I should actually be doing this. Post a comment. I'm looking at you Ryan Guill ;-)

---

Java

Next up was Java. Holy fuck what a morass of boilterplate nonsense I needed to perform this simple operation in Java. Deep breath...

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.stream.Collectors;

class IndexedPerson {
    String date;
    String name;
    
    public IndexedPerson(String date, String name) {
        this.date = date;
        this.name = name;
    }
    
    public String toString(){
        return String.format("{date: %s, name: %s}", this.date, this.name);
    }
}

class Collect {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        HashMap<String,String> peopleData = loadData();

        HashMap<String, IndexedPerson> people = mapToPeople(peopleData);
            
        dumpIdents(people);
    }
    
    private static HashMap<String,String> loadData(){
        HashMap<String,String> peopleData = new HashMap<String,String>();
        
        peopleData.put("2008-11-08", "Jacinda");
        peopleData.put("1990-10-27", "Bill");
        peopleData.put("2014-09-20", "James");
        peopleData.put("1979-05-24", "Winston");
        
        return peopleData;
    }
    
    private static HashMap<String,IndexedPerson> mapToPeople(HashMap<String,String> peopleData) {
        HashMap<String, IndexedPerson> people = (HashMap<String, IndexedPerson>) peopleData.entrySet().stream()
            .collect(Collectors.toMap(
                e -> e.getKey(),
                e -> new IndexedPerson(e.getKey(), e.getValue())
            ));
            
        return people;
    }
    
    private static void dumpIdents(HashMap<String,IndexedPerson> people) {
        for (Map.Entry<String, IndexedPerson> entry : people.entrySet()) {
            System.out.println(String.format("%s => %s", entry.getKey(), entry.getValue()));
        }
    }
    
}

Result:

1979-05-24 => {date: 1979-05-24, name: Winston}
2014-09-20 => {date: 2014-09-20, name: James}
1990-10-27 => {date: 1990-10-27, name: Bill}
2008-11-08 => {date: 2008-11-08, name: Jacinda}

Most of that lot seems to be just messing around telling Java what types everything are. Bleah.

The interesting bit - my grasp of which is tenuous - is the Collectors.toMap. I have to admit I derived that from reading various Stack Overflow articles. But I got it working, and I know the general approach now, so that's good.

Too much code for such a simple thing though, eh?

---

Groovy

Groovy is my antidote to Java. Groovy makes this shit easy:

class IndexedPerson {
    String date
    String name

    IndexedPerson(String date, String name) {
        this.date = date;
        this.name = name;
    }

    String toString(){
        String.format("date: %s, name: %s", this.date, this.name)
    }
}

peopleData = ["2008-11-08": "Jacinda", "1990-10-27": "Bill", "2014-09-20": "James", "1979-05-24": "Winston"]

people = peopleData.collectEntries {date, name -> [date, new IndexedPerson(date, name)]}

people.each {date, person -> println String.format("%s => {%s}", date, person)}

Bear in mind that most of that is getting the class defined, and the output. The bit that does the mapping is just the one line in the middle. That's more like it.

Again, I don't know much about Groovy… I had to RTFM to find out how to do the collectEntries bit, but it was easy to find and easy to understand.

I really wish I had a job doing Groovy.

Oh yeah, for the sake of completeness, the output was thus:

2008-11-08 => {date: 2008-11-08, name: Jacinda}
1990-10-27 => {date: 1990-10-27, name: Bill}
2014-09-20 => {date: 2014-09-20, name: James}
1979-05-24 => {date: 1979-05-24, name: Winston}

---

Ruby

Ruby's version was pretty simple too as it turns out. No surprise there as Ruby's all about higher order functions and applying blocks to collections and stuff like that.

class IndexedPerson

    def initialize(date, name)
        @date = date
        @name = name
    end

    def inspect
        "{date:#{@date}; name: #{@name}}\n"
    end
end

peopleData = {"2008-11-08" => "Jacinda", "1990-10-27" => "Bill", "2014-09-20" => "James", "1979-05-24" => "Winston"}

people = peopleData.merge(peopleData) do |date, name|
    IndexedPerson.new(date, name)
end

puts people

Predictable output:

{"2008-11-08"=>{date:2008-11-08; name: Jacinda}
, "1990-10-27"=>{date:1990-10-27; name: Bill}
, "2014-09-20"=>{date:2014-09-20; name: James}
, "1979-05-24"=>{date:1979-05-24; name: Winston}
}

I wasn't too sure about all that block nonsense when I first started looking at Ruby, but I quite like it now. It's easy to read.

---

Python

My Python skills don't extend much beyond printing G'day World on the screen, but it was surprisingly easy to google-up how to do this. And I finally got to see what Python folk are on about with this "comprehensions" stuff, which I think is quite cool.

class IndexedPerson:
    def __init__(self, date, name):
        self.date = date
        self.name = name

    def __repr__(self):
        return "{{date: {date}, name: {name}}}".format(date=self.date, name=self.name)

people_data = {"2008-11-08": "Jacinda", "1990-10-27": "Bill", "2014-09-20": "James", "1979-05-24": "Winston"}

people = {date: IndexedPerson(date, name) for (date, name) in people_data.items()}

print("\n".join(['%s => %s' % (date, person) for (date, person) in people.items()]))

And now that I am all about Clean Code, I kinda get the "whitespace as indentation" thing too. It's clear enough if yer code is clean in the first place.

The output of this is identical to the Groovy one.

Only one more then I'll stop.

---

Clojure

I can only barely do G'day World in Clojure, so this took me a while to work out. I also find the Clojure docs to be pretty impentrable. I'm sure they're great if one already knows what one is doing, but I found them pretty inaccessible from the perspective of a n00b. It's like if the PHP docs were solely the user-added stuff at the bottom of each docs page. Most blog articles I saw about Clojure were pretty much just direct regurgitation of the docs, without much value-add, if I'm to be honest.

(defrecord IndexedPerson [date name])

(def people-data (array-map "2008-11-08" "Jacinda" "1990-10-27" "Bill" "2014-09-20" "James" "1979-05-24" "Winston"))

(def people
  (reduce-kv
    (fn [people date name] (conj people (array-map date (IndexedPerson. date name))))
    (array-map)
    people-data))

(print people)

The other thing with Clojure for me is that the code is so alien-looking to me that I can't work out how to indent stuff to make the code clearer. All the examples I've seen don't seem very clear, and the indentation doesn't help either, I think. I guess with more practise it would come to me.

It seems pretty powerful though, cos there's mot much code there to achieve the desired end-goal.

Output for this one:

{2008-11-08 #user.IndexedPerson{:date 2008-11-08, :name Jacinda},
1990-10-27 #user.IndexedPerson{:date 1990-10-27, :name Bill},
2014-09-20 #user.IndexedPerson{:date 2014-09-20, :name James},
1979-05-24 #user.IndexedPerson{:date 1979-05-24, :name Winston}}

---

Summary

This was actually a very interesting exercise for me, and I learned stuff about all the languages concerned. Even PHP and CFML.

I twitterised a comment regarding how pleasing I found each solution:

In order of ease of use and how pleasing the solution seemed:
1 Python
2 Ruby
3 Groovy
4 CFML
5 JS
6 PHP
7 Java

— Adam Cameron (@adam_cameron) November 25, 2017

This was before I did the Clojure one, and I'd slot that in afer CFML and before JS, making the list:

1. Python
2. Ruby
3. Groovy
4. CFML
5. Clojure
6. JS
7. PHP
8. Java

Python's code looks nice and it was easy to find out what to do. Same with Ruby, just not quite so much. And, really same with Groovy. I could order those three any way. I think Python tips the scales slightly with the comprehensions.

CFML came out suprisingly well in this, as it's a bloody easy exercise to achieve with it.

Clojure's fine, just a pain in the arse to understand what's going on, and the code looks a mess to me. But it does a lot in little space.

JS was disappointing because it wasn't nearly so easy as I expected it to be.

PHP is a mess.

And - fuck me - Java. Jesus.

My occasional reader Barry O'Sullivan volunteered some input the other day:

Cool. If you'd like a Golang example just let me know. Be fun to collaborate.

— Barry O Sullivan (@barryosull) November 26, 2017

Hopefully he's still up for this, and I'll add it to the list so we can have a look at that code too.

Like I said before, if you know a better or more interesting way to do this in any of the languages above, or any other languages, make a comment and post a link to a Gist (just don't put the code inline in the comment please; it will not render at all well).

I might have another one of these exercises to do soon with another puzzle a friend of mine had to recently endure in a job-interview-related coding test. We'll see.

Righto.

--
Adam

PHP: array_map has a dumb implementation

G'day:
This cropped up a few weeks back, but I've had no motivation to write anything recently so I've sat on it for a bit. It came back to bite me again the other day and my motivation seems to be returning so here we go.

I was working on some code the other day wherein I needed to query some stuff from one DB, and then for the records returned from that, look for records in an entirely different data repository for some "additional data". The best I could do was to get the IDs from the first result and do like a WHERE IN (:ids) of the other data source to get records that were the additional data for some/all of the IDs. There was no one-to-one match between the two data sources, so the second set of results might not have records for all IDs from the first one. It was convenient for me to return the second result not as an indexed array, but as an associative array keyed on the ID. This is easy enough in PHP, and is quite handy:

$peopleData = $conn
    ->query('SELECT date, name FROM mapexampledata')
    ->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC | PDO::FETCH_COLUMN | PDO::FETCH_UNIQUE);

var_dump($peopleData);

Result:

[
    "2008-11-08" => "Jacinda",
    "1990-10-27" => "Bill",
    "2014-09-20" => "James",
    "1979-05-24" => "Winston"
]

Note how the array key is the date column from the query, and the value of the array is the other column (or all the subsequent columns, if there were more). I've just indexed by date here to make it more clear that the index key is not just an integer sequence.

From this data, I needed to remap that to be an array of PersonalMilestone objects, rather than an array of raw data. Note that the object has both date and name values:

class PersonalMilestone {
    public $date;
    public $name;

    function __construct($date, $name) {
        $this->date = $date;
        $this->name = $name;
    }
}

(If it's not obvious... this domain model and data is completely unrelated to the work I was actually doing, it's just something simple I concocted for this blog article. The general gist of the issue is preserved though).

"Easy", I thought; "that's just an array_map operation". Oh hohohoho, how funny I am. I forgot I was using PHP.

So I wrote my tests (OK, I did not write the tests for this example for the blog. "IRL" I did though. Always do TDD, remember?), and then went to write the array_map implementation:

$peopleData = ["2008-11-08" => "Jacinda", "1990-10-27" => "Bill", "2014-09-20" => "James", "1979-05-24" => "Winston"];

$people = array_map(function ($name) {
    return new PersonalMilestone(
        $date, // dammit this won't work: array_map only gives me the value, not the key
        $name
    );
}, $peopleData);

F*** it. This just beggars my belief as the other languages I have done the same operation on passes both key and value into the map call back. What does PHP do instead? Well it allows you to pass multiple arrays to the array_map function, and the callback receives the value from each of those arrays. I dunno why they chose to implement that as even additional behaviour, let along the default (and only) behaviour. Sigh.

But I thought I could leverage this! I could pass the keys of my array in as a second array, and then I'll have both the values I need to create the PersonalMilestone object. Hurrah!

$peopleData = ["2008-11-08" => "Jacinda", "1990-10-27" => "Bill", "2014-09-20" => "James", "1979-05-24" => "Winston"];

$keys = array_keys($peopleData);

$people = array_map(function ($name, $date) {
    return new PersonalMilestone($date, $name);
}, $peopleData, $keys);

var_dump($people);

Result:

array(4) {
  [0]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#2 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "2008-11-08"
    ["name"]=>
    string(7) "Jacinda"
  }
  [1]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#3 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "1990-10-27"
    ["name"]=>
    string(4) "Bill"
  }
  [2]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#4 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "2014-09-20"
    ["name"]=>
    string(5) "James"
  }
  [3]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#5 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "1979-05-24"
    ["name"]=>
    string(7) "Winston"
  }
}

Looks OK right? Look again. The array has been changed into an indexed array. So this isn't a remapping, this is just "making a different array". F***'s sake, PHP.

Initially I thought this was because the two arrays I was remapping had different keys, and thought "aah... yeah... if I was daft I could see how I might implement the thing like this", so I changed the second array to be keyed by its own value (whilst shaking my head in disbelief).

$peopleData = ["2008-11-08" => "Jacinda", "1990-10-27" => "Bill", "2014-09-20" => "James", "1979-05-24" => "Winston"];
var_dump($peopleData);

$keys = array_keys($peopleData);
$keysIndexedByKeys = array_combine($keys, $keys);
var_dump($keysIndexedByKeys);

$people = array_map(function ($name, $date) {
    return new PersonalMilestone($date, $name);
}, $peopleData, $keys);

var_dump($people);

(and, yes, this is a lot of horsing around now, even had it worked which (spoiler) it didn't).

Result:

array(4) {
  ["2008-11-08"]=>
  string(7) "Jacinda"
  ["1990-10-27"]=>
  string(4) "Bill"
  ["2014-09-20"]=>
  string(5) "James"
  ["1979-05-24"]=>
  string(7) "Winston"
}
array(4) {
  ["2008-11-08"]=>
  string(10) "2008-11-08"
  ["1990-10-27"]=>
  string(10) "1990-10-27"
  ["2014-09-20"]=>
  string(10) "2014-09-20"
  ["1979-05-24"]=>
  string(10) "1979-05-24"
}
array(4) {
  [0]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#2 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "2008-11-08"
    ["name"]=>
    string(7) "Jacinda"
  }
  [1]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#3 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "1990-10-27"
    ["name"]=>
    string(4) "Bill"
  }
  [2]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#4 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "2014-09-20"
    ["name"]=>
    string(5) "James"
  }
  [3]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#5 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "1979-05-24"
    ["name"]=>
    string(7) "Winston"
  }
}

So the first array and the second array now have the same keys, but... the remapped array still doesn't. This is where we get to the subject line of this article: array_map has a dumb implementation.

I gave up on array_map. I really don't think it's fit for purpose beyond the most obviously simple applications. I just used a foreach loop instead:

$people = [];
foreach ($peopleData as $date => $name) {
    $people[$date] = new PersonalMilestone($date, $name);
}

var_dump($people);

And this works:

array(4) {
  ["2008-11-08"]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#1 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "2008-11-08"
    ["name"]=>
    string(7) "Jacinda"
  }
  ["1990-10-27"]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#2 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "1990-10-27"
    ["name"]=>
    string(4) "Bill"
  }
  ["2014-09-20"]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#3 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "2014-09-20"
    ["name"]=>
    string(5) "James"
  }
  ["1979-05-24"]=>
  object(PersonalMilestone)#4 (2) {
    ["date"]=>
    string(10) "1979-05-24"
    ["name"]=>
    string(7) "Winston"
  }
}

This is simple enough code, but I like having my code more descriptive if possible, so if I'm iterating over an array because I want to remap its values, then I prefer to use a mapping call, not a generic loop. But we need to be pragmatic about these things.

Oh... for the sake of completeness I did work out how to do it "properly" (where "properly" == "passes my tests" not "is good code"):

$keys = new ArrayIterator(array_keys($peopleData));

$people = array_map(function ($name) use ($keys) {
    $date = $keys->current();
    $keys->next();
    return new PersonalMilestone($date, $name);
}, $peopleData);

(I'll spare you the output... you get the idea by now).

What I've done here is to pass a separate iterator into the callback, and I manually iterate over that each iteration of the callback loop. This gives me the value for the date key for each element of the source array. But that's just shoehorning square peg into a round hole, so I would note that down as a curio, but not actually advocate its use.

I was left with the feeling "PHP, you're f***in' rubbish" (a feeling I get increasingly the more I use it), but I thought just cos I know other languages which do this in a more clear fashion doesn't mean that they're right and PHP is (unhelpfully) wrong. I decided to have a look at how a few other languages tackle the same issue, to see if PHP really does suck in this regard. However that will be the topic for a follow-up article, as this one is already long enough.

Righto.

--
Adam

PHP: misuse of nullable arguments

G'day:
PHP 7.1 added nullable types to the PHP language. Here's the RFC. In short, one can specify that a return type or an argument type will accept null instead of an object (or primitive) of the specified type. This code demonstrates:

function f(int $x) : int {
    return $x;
}

try {
    $x = null;
    $y = f($x);
} catch (\TypeError $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
}

echo PHP_EOL . PHP_EOL;

function g(?int $x) : ?int {
    return $x;
}

$x = null;
$y = g($x);
var_dump($y);

Ouptut:

Argument 1 passed to f() must be of the type integer, null given, called in [...][...] on line 8

NULL

Why do we want this? Well if we look at a statically-typed language, it makes a bit of sense:

 public class NullableTest {
     
     public static void main(String[] args){
         Integer x = null;
         Integer y = f(x);
         System.out.println(y);
     }
          
     private static Integer f(Integer x){
         return x;
     }
 }

So x is an Integer... it's just not been given a value yet, but it'll pass the type-check on the method signature. (This just outputs null, btw).

I think the merits of this functionality in PHP is limited when it comes to an argument type. If we had that equivalent code in PHP, it's not that x is an int that just happens to not have been given a value; it's a null. Not the same. It's a trivial but key difference I think.

Semantics aside there are occasional times where it's handy and - more importantly - appropriate. Consider the setMethods method of PHPUnit's MockBuilder class. The way this works is that one can pass one of three values to the method:

• null - no methods will be mocked-out;
• an empty array - all methods will be mocked-out;
• an array of method names - just those methods will be mocked-out.

[docs][implementation]

Here the null has meaning, and it's distinct in meaning from an empty array. Even then this only makes "sense" because for convenience the meaning of an empty array is inversed when compared to a partial array: a partial array means "only these ones", an empty array following that logic would mean "only these ones, which is none of them", but it has been given a special meaning (and IMO "special meaning" is something one ought to be hesitant about assigning to a value). Still: it's handy.

Had I been implementing PHPUnit, I probably would not have supported null there. I'd've perhaps had two methods: mockMethods(array subsetToMock) and mockAllMethods(), and if one doesn't specify either of those, then no methods are mocked. No values with special meaning, and clearly-named methods. Shrug. PHPUnit rocks, so this is not an indictment of it.


On the other hand, most of the usage I have seen of nullable arguments is this sort of thing:

function f(?int $x = 0){
    if (is_null($x)){
        $x = 0;
    }
    // rest of function, which requires $x to be an int
}

This is a misuse of the nullable functionality. This function actually requires the argument to be an integer. Null is not a meaningful value to it. So the function simply should not accept a null. It's completely legit for a function to specify what it needs, and require the calling code to actually respect that contract.

I think in the cases I have seen this being done that the dev concerned is also working on the calling code, and they "know" the calling code could quite likely have a null for the value they need to pass to this function, but instead of dealing with that in the calling code, they push the responsibility into the method. This ain't the way to do these things. A method shouldn't have to worry about the vagaries of the situation it's being used in. It should specify what it needs from the calling code to do its job, and that's it.

Another case I've seen is that the dev concerned didn't quite get the difference between "nullable" and having an argument default. They're two different things, and they're conflating the two. When an argument is nullable, one still actually needs to pass a value to it, null or otherwise:

function f(?int $x) : int {
    return $x;
}

try {
    $y = f();
} catch (\TypeError $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
}

Output:

Too few arguments to function f(), 0 passed in [...][...] on line 7 and exactly 1 expected

All "nullable" means is it can be null.

I really think the occasions where a nullable argument is legit is pretty rare, so if yer writing code or reviewing someone else's code and come across one being used... stop and think about what's going on, and whether the function is taking on a responsibility the calling code oughta be looking after.

Righto.

--
Adam