I would also like to not that encoding the the Option<char> using the unused bits of the return value is a perfectly valid implementation. But that is exactly what it is, an implementation detail. It could work exactly the same way as today but the programmer wouldn’t have to care about how it was implemented, just whether they got a char or None.

> No, encoding additional information in unused bits of an int that you return is stupid over-engineering that needs multiple textbooks to grok. Option<char>, on the other hand, is the simplest possible solution for this problem.

What kind of wicked education you had for this to be the case?

My dad taught me about bits and bytes and words when I was a kid, and by 16 I had a quite solid grasp of it (without any textbook). Then I studied several years and got a phd in applied math (mostly numerical pde, and that involved a lot of programming). Then I have spent 15 more years doing math and programming in several languages (mostly C and Python) and getting paid for teaching data science and signal processing to people who got on to have fruitful jobs in industry. Today, I read the wikipedia page about "option type" [1] and the one about about type theory [2], which seems a prerequisite, and couldn't understand a word.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_theory