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In object-oriented computer programming, a null object is an object with no referenced value or with defined neutral (null) behavior.The null object design pattern, which describes the uses of such objects and their behavior (or lack thereof), was first published as "Void Value" [1] and later in the Pattern Languages of Program Design book series as "Null Object".
C# 6.0 and above have ?., the null-conditional member access operator (which is also called the Elvis operator by Microsoft and is not to be confused with the general usage of the term Elvis operator, whose equivalent in C# is ??, the null coalescing operator) and ?[], the null-conditional element access operator, which performs a null-safe call of an indexer get accessor.
Some languages assist this task by offering constructs to handle the initializedness of variables; for example, C# has a special flavour of call-by-reference parameters to subroutines (specified as out instead of the usual ref), asserting that the variable is allowed to be uninitialized on entry but will be initialized afterwards.
C# has and allows pointers to selected types (some primitives, enums, strings, pointers, and even arrays and structs if they contain only types that can be pointed [14]) in unsafe context: methods and codeblock marked unsafe. These are syntactically the same as pointers in C and C++.
Programming languages use different literals for the null pointer. In Python, for example, a null value is called None. In Java and C#, the literal null is provided as a literal for reference types. In Pascal and Swift, a null pointer is called nil. In Eiffel, it is called a void reference.
In computer programming, lazy initialization is the tactic of delaying the creation of an object, the calculation of a value, or some other expensive process until the first time it is needed.
Void safety (also known as null safety) is a guarantee within an object-oriented programming language that no object references will have null or void values. In object-oriented languages, access to objects is achieved through references (or, equivalently, pointers ).
Neither Common Lisp nor Scheme has anything corresponding to null. The test "null" tests something for being the empty list, Python [], a value which is false in Common Lisp and true in Scheme. It has nothing to do with Python None, C NULL, or Java and C# null. --John Cowan 12:50, 13 October 2019 (UTC)