A Philosophy of Software Design

[Dom Disc]

On Sunday, 24 May 2026 at 04:10:31 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

> 3. Invalid code nodes are replaced with "Error" nodes. This 
> worked far better than I anticipated. No exceptions are thrown. 
> It also behaves like NaN.

This is why I always suggested a NaN value for all types. For 
signed integers the unfortunate T.min (0x80..00) which has no 
positive counterpart is the perfect candidate for NaN. Unsigned 
types doesn't have such a good candidate - for sure, most 
calculations that try to prevent overflows are very unlikely to 
return 0xFF..FF as result, nevertheless this is a valid result. 
So defining T.max as NaN is possible but ugly.