Re: Document NULL

On Tue, Jan 6, 2026 at 12:11 PM Marcos Pegoraro <marcos(at)f10(dot)com(dot)br> wrote:

> Em ter., 11 de nov. de 2025 às 12:34, Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)kurilemu(dot)de>
> escreveu:
>
>> I have rebased this; here's v9. I haven't reviewed it in depth, but
>> intend to give it a read and get it pushed sometime in the
>> not-too-distant future, so if anybody wants to review it some more, it'd
>> be appreciated.
>>
>
> - Reading this document I see that he uses "the empty string" but DOCs
> uses more "an empty string".
> Then a few minutes ago I sent a patch [1] to use "an empty string" instead
> of "the empty string".
> If that patch is accepted then this could be done here too.
>

That patch probably isn't going in and the two phrasing do tend to denote
different things even if being correct is hard. I made a couple of tweaks
but in any case either wording tends to adequately convey the necessary
meaning.

> - I think using several commands and their results in a <programlisting>
> is difficult to read,
> mainly because some commands result on 2 or more lines, some an empty
> line,
> so it is difficult to see what command generated what result. Maybe
> separate them into 2 blocks, maybe.
>
>

I decided to do manual inline comments in the output where it seemed
necessary. Let's see how that plays out.

Version 10 attached as a single patch (just needs a commit message)

I brought the introductory paragraph current.
Notably, I went with "Null" as the \pset display null value instead of \N
(find-replace and fixes, did not re-run commands in psql, looks correct
though and it is fairly mechanical).

David J.