[valenterry]

> Whether that goes into the standard library, or gets a little language syntax support as well, is something you can argue about, but is pretty arbitrary and probably just comes down to the style of the language.

Not really. That's maybe the impression you might, but it's not true. The "language syntax support" isn't really syntax, it is a deep conceptual change of the language. Now instead having functions return one value, they _can always return 2 different types_ and you don't know if they really do unless you know the implementation (which sometimes you can't).

That not only causes pain on a daily basis for most developers, it especially causes pain for library authors (which you are maybe not, so it is not as visible to you) and it especially causes troubles down the road with other concepts.

As example, check out Java's try-with-resources. It is a bandage over a bandage and while it improves things it is difficult to get right and has a lot of corner cases and really strange behaviour, especially in combination with constructors.

With plain simple language features, something like that does not happen.