Why does Oracle 9i treat an empty string as NULL?

Question

I know that it does consider \' \' as NULL, but that doesn\'t do much to tell me why this is the case. As I understand the SQL specifications

Answer 1

Empty string is the same as NULL simply because its the "lesser evil" when compared to the situation when the two (empty string and null) are not the same.

In languages where NULL and empty String are not the same, one has to always check both conditions.