Why does null exist in .NET?

Question

Why can values be null in .NET? Is this superior to having a guarantee where everything would have a value and nothing call be null?

Anyone knows what each of these

Answer 1

This reminds me of an episode of James Burke's "Connections" series where monks were transcribing arabic to latin and first encountered a zero digit. Roman arithmetic did not have a representation for zero, but arabic/aramaic arithmetic did. "Why do we have to write a letter to indicate nothing?" argued the Catholic monks. "If it is nothing, we should write nothing!"

Fortunately for modern society, they lost the argument and learned to write zero digits in their maths. ;>

Null simply represents an absence of an object. There are programming languages which do not have "null" per se, but most of them do still have something to represent the absence of a legitimate object. If you throw away "null" and replace it with something called "EmptyObject" or "NullNode", it's still a null just with a different name.

If you remove the ability for a programming language to represent a variable or field that does not reference a legitimate object, that is, you require that every variable and field always contain a true and valid object instance, then you make some very useful and efficient data structures awkward and inefficient, such as building a linked list. Instead of using a null to indicate the end of the linked list, the programmer is forced to invent "fake" object instances to serve as list terminals that do nothing but indicate "there's nothing here".

Delving into existentialism here, but: If you can represent the presence of something, then isn't there a fundamental need to be able to represent the absence of it as well?