Comment by kibwen

The exclamation point is also used both as the C-style negation operator and as the identifier suffix that indicates macro invocations, so it was unlikely that it would have been used for any new feature. As my sibling comment notes, this syntax for divergence is very, very old (predating even 0.1), not something that anyone newly came up with.

And if you'd like to write `-> Never`, the nice thing about being a first-class type is that you can now just do that if you'd like, via a standard type alias: `type Never = !;`.