What you want is a 'bottom' class (as opposed to 'top' = Object), not null. Essentially, a class that subclasses everything to indicate some problem. Look at

What you want is a 'bottom' class (as opposed to 'top' = Object), not null. Essentially, a class that subclasses everything to indicate some problem. Look at how 'null' works: the class of 'null' (whether it can be expressed in a language or not) is a subclass of anything you define, so you can assign 'null' to any variable of any class you define. This is how 'bottom' works, if you want it as a class. But you already recognise that this is not really what you want: you want specialised sub-classes representing errors of specific classes you defined, which are all superclasses of a global bottom class. Such a system can be done, but it is probably super ugly and confusing. The usual answer instead is: exceptions, i.e., instead of instanciating an error object, throw an exception (well: you do instanciate an error object here...). That works, but if overdone, you get programming my exception, e.g., when normal error conditions (like 'cannot open file') are mapped to exceptions instead of return values. The usual answer to that problem then is to use a special generic error class that you specialise for your type, the simplest of which is 'Optional' from which you can derive 'Optional<MyType>'. You can define your own generic type 'Error<MyType>', with info about the error, of course. I think (please correct me if I am wrong), this is currently the state of the art of doing error handling. It's where Rust and Haskell and many other languages are. I've seen nothing more elegant so far -- and it is an ugly problem.