Abstractly dealing with a problem where there's already a negative infinity is no problem. e.g. you can just add another negative infinity that's even smaller.

Abstractly dealing with a problem where there's already a negative infinity is no problem. e.g. you can just add another negative infinity that's even smaller. That negative infinity can also be your error value; concretely you might do that by writing a generic algorithm that operates on any Ordered type, and then provide an Ordering instance on Result[E,A] where an E is less than all A. `A` could be some extended number type, or another `Result[E,A']`, or whatever thing with its own `Ordering`.