Re: Document NULL

On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 12:39 PM Marcos Pegoraro <marcos(at)f10(dot)com(dot)br> wrote:

> Em ter., 11 de mar. de 2025 às 12:52, David G. Johnston <
> david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> escreveu:
>
>> The markup surrounding the examples is correct now and I decided \N was
>> the most useful representation of NULL given that the query data is single
>> digit numbers. I really hate the non-readability of t/f output for
>> booleans so I manually cleaned those up.
>>
>
> You defined \N to show NULL values. But then all other places in the DOCs
> do not use this definition, so it can be confusing for the user.
> Here we have a \N and everywhere else only spaces ?
>
> I understand that there are many places to replace, but I think it would
> be better to have a single standard everywhere, don't you think ?
> On the other hand, if we replace them all, other users can be confused
> too, if they do not read this page and see an \N on any other page.
> What's this \N, he can think. \N is not self-explanatory.
>

I'm mostly indifferent and it is very simple to change. It seemed
desirable to have the main topic of this page display as something that
isn't invisible though. And NULL was unappealing since it naturally
appears in data. Since COPY uses \N I figured it was a decent choice.
<null> or <NULL> came to mind too, but there were long compared to 1, 2,
and 4 that appear along side it.

David J.