what's a (null)?

[steuben]

every once in a while i will loot a (null). so i wonder what it is and why it doesn\'t appear in my inventory.

i think it maybe related to a tria amount generation, but i\'m not sure. i think i see it most with thugs and trepors. critters that drop tria when killed.

[stfrn]

It\'s like a rat hide but... well, no. It\'s actually one or more hexas.
You see, when a program is told to output something, but is not given anything , it outputs null. There was a bug where if only hexa was looted, it didn\'t know what to call it, so it juse said null. Fixed in the next update.

[steuben]

really cause, i seem to recall having looted only hexa on occastion, and not get a (null). or does it only occastionally crop up?

checks his scroll back... maybe not. i\'m probably just substituting my own reality there.

[DaveG]

Originally posted by stfrn
You see, when a program is told to output something, but is not given anything , it outputs null.

Technically, when a program is told to output something it doesn\'t have, it just outputs whatever is at the memory location of where it\'s looking... usually a pile of garbage, that it doesn\'t have access to, resulting in a lovely segfault crash.  Having the variable in question output (null) as default is a much better result.  

[khellendros1984]

Depends on the language....java returns a null object type....but yea, C/C++ return the data at specified memory location. Stupid java, not treating pointers like pointers....