It is known to be one of the major controversies because originally NULL means the absence of a value which entails that it is not a value. Hence, if there are no values, then we cannot do any operations. Yet, for whatever reason (avoiding exceptions etc.) expressions with NULL need to be evaluated and hence NULL is treated as a value. So we get a problem: NULL is not a value AND NULL is a value. There are different views on this problem and the solution implemented in SQL (and three-valued logic) is probably not the best one.