Welcome to the world of

(a) standards

(b) poorly implemented standards

(c) poorly implemented programmers :-)

I blame c. Those mothers should learn how to implement their programmers.

Funny, I read this as "I blame C [the language]". I was taken aback because obviously "null" in C is a 5 byte character array and would never be confused for NULL.

Hehe, I red it the same way first. In C NULL is clearly not the same as "Null".

Humanity needs an update, bad. I'm expecting one within 100 and 1,000 years from now, but the chances of introducing regressions is very high.

I'd rather wish for a good update...we've had too many bad updates so far ;)

It's a SOAP request going from a flash client to a coldfusion server. Yeah.

I still didn't get that. In SOAP request empty value should be clearly distinct from the string with "Null" value, as well as from the nil case.

For example:

<elem>Null</elem> - element equal to "Null"

<elem/> - empty element (can also have a nil attribute set to true).

All I meant was that all three of those technologies are famous for their unreliability. OK perhaps the flash runtime not so much, it's disliked for different reasons. It's definitely true of the other two. I've had to talk soap to a coldfusion service before and it's not an environment conducive to safe programming.

All it takes is one piece of code in the chain deciding to "helpfully" "fix" cases where people have stringified null values in a system that stringifies null to "null" by "translating them back" to null, and voila, you have a broken system.

A lot of problems like these are down to programmers that try to fix bugs by fixing the symptoms.

Yes, this looks to be ColdFusion doing very weird things by randomly interpreting strings.