The null character (also null terminator) is a character with the value zero, present in the ASCII and Unicode character sets, and available in nearly all mainstream programming languages. The original meaning of this character was like NOP — when sent to a printer or a terminal, it does nothing (some terminals, however, incorrectly display it as space). On punched tapes, this character is represented with no holes at all, so a new unpunched tape is initially filled with null characters.