[tsimionescu]

That just gets us back to the problem for which Null is introduced in almost every lamguage: indicating the absence of a value. This is an important feature in every language, and null is the most popular solution to it (the only significant alternative is the Maybe monad).

To put this in more concrete terms, if this change were integrated in Java, how would you indicate the difference between a JSON document which doesn't contain a field VS one where the field is an empty string?

[codebje]

I dare say there's a lot more use of a magic value to indicate no value than a distinguishable representation of it :-)

I base this mostly on an assumption of C still being one of the most widely used languages for the code that's running out there in the world. In C, after all, NULL is just a magic value rather than a distinguishable representation of no value, though that's just one example out of a host of others, all the way down to the venerable NUL-terminated string.

As for your question: something like 'keys(jsonobject).contains("fieldName")' ? Or 'NoSuchFieldException' thrown if you do 'jsonobject.get("fieldName")' ?

(The latter of which, given the general uneasiness NullPointerException creates in us devs, is often how a Java API will work anyway! Checked exceptions won the day! Until the Functional interface was made, at least.)

Or to answer it in the same spirit as this overall comment, why would you need to distinguish between missing and empty? Can't you just define the semantics of the document s.t. those two things having the same effect?

[tsimionescu]

I don't agree that C's NULL is any different from Java's null or modern C++'s nullptr, at least outside of embedded contexts (where sometimes people actually store stuff at the 0 address). Sure, it's normallt just a macro that resolves to 0 at the implementation level. But people use it like in C++: you want to return an int, but also distinguish the case where no int could be returned? Return an int*, and NULL signifies no data.

> As for your question: something like 'keys(jsonobject).contains("fieldName")' ? Or 'NoSuchFieldException' thrown if you do 'jsonobject.get("fieldName")' ?

> (The latter of which, given the general uneasiness NullPointerException creates in us devs, is often how a Java API will work anyway! Checked exceptions won the day! Until the Functional interface was made, at least.)

I was thinking more of the case where you deserialize a JSON object into a Java object, and then inspect the Java object. Regardless, it was just an example - the problem of distinguishing "no value" from "any value" is pervasive in programming, and all languages must have some strategy for it. If we got rid of null from Java, then Option<T> would probably be the only general candidate. Which, to be fair, would be slightly better, as it would at least force you to check.

> Or to answer it in the same spirit as this overall comment, why would you need to distinguish between missing and empty? Can't you just define the semantics of the document s.t. those two things having the same effect?

Not in the general case, no. At least not without doubling every field and adding other inconsistency issues ({"result": "ABC", hasResult: false}).