为什么Hashtable ConcurrentHashmap不支持key或者value为null

在很多java资料中，都有提到 ConcurrentHashmap HashMap和Hashtable都是key-value存储结构，但他们有一个不同点是 ConcurrentHashmap、Hashtable不支持key或者value为null，而HashMap是支持的。为什么会有这个区别？在设计上的目的是什么？

在网上找到了这样的解答:The main reason that nulls aren’t allowed in ConcurrentMaps (ConcurrentHashMaps, ConcurrentSkipListMaps) is that ambiguities that may be just barely tolerable in non-concurrent maps can’t be accommodated. The main one is that if map.get(key) returns null, you can’t detect whether the key explicitly maps to null vs the key isn’t mapped. In a non-concurrent map, you can check this via map.contains(key), but in a concurrent one, the map might have changed between calls.

理解如下：ConcurrentHashmap和Hashtable都是支持并发的，这样会有一个问题，当你通过get(k)获取对应的value时，如果获取到的是null时，你无法判断，它是put（k,v）的时候value为null，还是这个key从来没有做过映射。HashMap是非并发的，可以通过contains(key)来做这个判断。而支持并发的Map在调用m.contains（key）和m.get(key),m可能已经不同了。

个人觉得这个解答还是很有道理的，也是解决了心头的一个疑惑，大牛们在设计时确实考虑的很多，在这里分享给大家。

类似的解答还有这个：
down vote
I believe it is, at least in part, to allow you to combine containsKey and get into a single call. If the map can hold nulls, there is no way to tell if get is returning a null because there was no key for that value, or just because the value was null.

Why is that a problem? Because there is no safe way to do that yourself. Take the following code:

if (m.containsKey(k)) {
   return m.get(k);
} else {
   throw new KeyNotPresentException();
}

Since m is a concurrent map, key k may be deleted between the containsKey and get calls, causing this snippet to return a null that was never in the table, rather than the desired KeyNotPresentException.

Normally you would solve that by synchronizing, but with a concurrent map that of course won’t work. Hence the signature for get had to change, and the only way to do that in a backwards-compatible way was to prevent the user inserting null values in the first place, and continue using that as a placeholder for “key not found”.

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