I wasn't making any statement about how common it was, only about how impractical it was. And soon enough you'll find that it is just more convenient to reuse

I wasn't making any statement about how common it was, only about how impractical it was. And soon enough you'll find that it is just more convenient to reuse a few error codes here and there, and soon enough applications just report "error -1: resource failure" or "internal failure" or some other meaningless thing. Far better to just return a string.