Is null a keyword?

[Rajiv KumarRai]

Is null a keyword?

Thanks in advance to all ranchers

[William Cantree]

If by keyword you mean reserved word? Yes.

Here are all of the reserved words in Java: http://java.about.com/od/javasyntax/a/reservedwords.htm

Otherwise, I have no idea with what you mean...

[Rajiv KumarRai]

Yes i meant to say that whether null is a reserved word in Java

[Campbell Ritchie]

Welcome to the Ranch
No, it is not a keyword. It is a reserved word used as a literal. The details are in the Java Language Specification.

[Campbell Ritchie]

You need to be specific with what you ask. It may appear pedantic, but you are working with programming and the machine will be very pedantic with you.

[Mike Simmons]

Although I'm usually on the side of the pedants, I'm not sure how it really matters here. It's certainly true that the JLS says null is not a keyword, and that you can't use null as an identifier. They never appear to describe null as "reserved".

More importantly though, is there any useful consequence of this distinction? I mean, if the JLS had just added null, true and false to the list of keywords, and omitted any mention of the null literal or boolean literals (referring instead to the "keyword null" and the "keywords true and false" respectively) would Java behave any differently? I think the answer is no. Perhaps there's some subtle distinction at work here, but so far I can't see what it is.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Agree it would have made no difference if they had called null a keyword. But oddly enough, as you said, it doesn’t actually say null is a reserved word. The Java5 version of the JLS says exactly the same.