As a paradigm/concept that is exactly what I was talking about, right.

But implementation-wise... It seems that there will be *at least* the same
amount of boiler-plate on caller side:
if ( value && status )
if ( value && ! status )
if ( ! value && status )
if ( ! value && ! status )
Also, it is interesting why the "empty" state is not considered as an
error. If a function that is supposed to resolve a hostname to address
returns empty valstat, is not it an error?