Question of the Day

I stumped the gurus on SQLServerCentral.com with another challenging Question of the Day on April 6th, 2009:

Given this code,

DECLARE @val int;
SET @val = -1
CREATE TABLE #empty (val int)

which statement(s) will result in @val being NULL? (select all that apply)

1. SET @val = NULL
2. SELECT @val = NULL FROM #empty
3. SELECT @val = val FROM #empty
4. SELECT @val = (SELECT val FROM #empty)

As of today, only about 30% of respondents answered correctly, and judging from the comments in the discussion section, a lot of them gained a deeper understanding of the concept of null in SQL. I try to make my questions (and answers), tricky enough so as to not be obvious, but my goal isn't to trick people with arcane technicalities - I want to make them aware of certain subtleties of the database engine. This question arose after some unexpected results made me delve into a bit of code, and tested scenarios just like those in the question.