Comment by kibwen

> Is it obvious to rust developers that "!" would be the never type?

Prior to this change most Rust developers would never have cause to ever use `!` for any reason. The only stable way to do so would be to specify the quote-unquote "return type" of divergent functions, which Rust has supported via this special-cased syntax since prehistoric days, before even Mozilla got involved. You can see it in the oldest capture of the tutorial from Jan 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20120109041112/http://www.rust-l...

So when it came time to elevate `!` from being a special-cased return type to being a fully-fledged type, it was only natural to reuse this syntax. However, I tend to agree that, because we call it "the never type" in casual conversation, the most natural thing to do would be to just have a type alias called `Never` that we could encourage people to use instead. But that would be a perfectly backwards-compatible change that could be made at any point (as proven by the fact that the stopgap and long-stable `Infallible` type is becoming just such a type).