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by flqn 917 days ago
Not so much "error reporting" as "there is no meaningful return value" for a position in a string -- if it wasn't found, it doesn't have a position.

If you use either Optional or Result you don't need to choose a special value like -1 to be your "invalid string position" case which could be used incorrectly.

I'd argue it's largely stylistic for this example, especially so outside of functional programming niches.

1 comments

It nevertheless in no way solves the problem that the article is about.