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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

From wikipedia: [The symbol ω is used] in relational database theory to represent NULL, a missing or inapplicable value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega

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I thought it was from this usage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_uncountable_ordinal

basically going as far as possible in the sequence C, C++, ...

Not to be too pedantic, but little omega is not the first uncountable ordinal (it is countable by definition), it is the first infinite one.

You know what, you're right (and if I may add, on both counts ;-).

The wikipedia page I referenced, loosely summarized, is referring to an ordinal number with the cardinality aleph-1. The plain omega that I should have referenced has cardinality aleph-0.

Unfortunately, the ordinal I wanted does not have its own wikipedia page. WTF? Merely countable is not notable enough?

Some research project about a new language and the top comments are about how weird its name is and how the character looks like a butt? I'm speechless.

Unfortunately, it looks precisely like an ASCII ass.

> Unfortunately, it looks precisely like an ASCII ass.

In my font, it's wide enough to be a Unicode ass.

Reddit-style thread?

You should start your sequence with C--, another popular language in the C family.

This is interesting - I always took the name to mean "the last" as in the last in the line of C programming languages you'll ever need, but it had some interesting null semantics too. I remember at the time when I was looking into Cw thinking the way it handled nulls was better than C#/Java etc in this regard - Cw returns (or should it be returned for this mostly-retired language) NULL for properties of nullable types that are themselves null. So you could go if (Foo.Bar.Baz == 1) and not get a nullreferenceexception if Foo or Bar were null. This seemed like an elegant way around the 'billion dollar mistake' of null references, and all that horrible null checking code you usually have to write if you're paranoid. (Note - all of this is getting paged out of my 2004-ish programming brain).

I can't help but read that little Omega as an angular velocity. C would then be it's inertia moment, and the product the angular moment. Quite ironic since it seems the language has a hard time gaining momentum.

Who calls their programming language see butt.

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