Mis on andmetüübi Nothing eesmärk programmeerimises?

In programming, the Nothing data type is commonly used to indicate the absence of a value or the impossibility of returning a value. In languages like Kotlin, Nothing means that a function never returns control to the caller — for example, it always throws an exception or is in an infinite loop.

Example of usage in Kotlin:

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

Here, the fail function never returns a value, so its type is Nothing. This helps the compiler understand that after calling such a function, the code will not continue.