Nul/nill/0 instead of nil as script handle

[Celery]

I've seen a lot of people using disposable script handles like nul, nill or 0, but what exactly is the reason nil isn't used? I've used nil as a spawn handle in numerous simultaneous loops and other things, and so far there hasn't been a single conflict.

[SaOk]

I have heard that the best would be to use "local" _nul. My guess is that if you use nil the system may mix the orginal meaning of nil.

[Celery]

I did a test and nil does indeed seem to change instead of staying as nil.

[Xeno]

If you create a global variable nil, either by assigning a script handle to it or another value, you "overwrite" the engine nil.

Now if you want to mark a variable for the VM to be collected with nil, for example somearray = nil, you assign the script handle to somearray.
An isNil "somearray" check will then always return false as somearray points to the scripthandle, means it isn't nil and you can't nilify a variable anymore.

The same is true for player. player = 0 will create a global variable called player.
If you use player in a script the global variable with value 0 is used instead of the engine player reference.

Xeno

[galzohar]

Yeah basically any engine variable will get messed up when you assign a new value for it, so you should avoid it in order to not break scripts that might use that variable.