Какова роль и применение класса Nothing в программировании?

In Kotlin, the class Nothing is used to denote a type that has no values. This means that a function returning Nothing will never complete normally — it either throws an exception or enters an infinite loop.

Uses of Nothing:

• To denote functions that always terminate with an error, for example, throw Exception().
• It is used to indicate that code after such a function call is unreachable.

Example:

fun fail(message: String): Nothing {
    throw IllegalArgumentException(message)
}

fun example(): Int {
    fail("Error")
    // Code here is unreachable
}

Thus, Nothing helps the compiler understand that the program execution will not continue after such a function call.