Why does Oracle 9i treat an empty string as NULL?

Question

I know that it does consider \' \' as NULL, but that doesn\'t do much to tell me why this is the case. As I understand the SQL specifications

Answer 1

Because not treating it as NULL isn't particularly helpful, either.

If you make a mistake in this area on Oracle, you usually notice right away. In SQL server, however, it will appear to work, and the problem only appears when someone enters an empty string instead of NULL (perhaps from a .net client library, where null is different from "", but you usually treat them the same).

I'm not saying Oracle is right, but it seems to me that both ways are approximately equally bad.