This brings up a point I was trying to make to wife the other day. My assertion was, "90% or more of questions can't be answered with the information given in the question." I find this to be true since most questions are missing context. "Did you go to the store?" This is a common question and in a two-way conversation the correct context is inferred. There are many questions that come up on mailing lists and here at a monastery that more then fall into the unanswerable due to missing context and at the same time it would be more then time prohibitive to post all the context leading to the pending question.

Is there anything we can do about this? Absolutely not, the world would grind to a halt and we would spend all of our time explaining context instead of making assumptions that allow us to communicate in a somewhat fluid manner.

So as for what merlyn posted, he is more then correct IMHO because the context surrounding the authors meaning of NULL is unknown.