出于同样的原因，定义不存在的错误是有意义的，而定义其他不存在的特殊情况也是有意义的。特殊情况可能导致代码中混入 if 语句，这使代码难以理解并导致错误。因此，应尽可能消除特殊情况。做到这一点的最佳方法是设计一种普通情况，这种方式可以自动处理特殊情况而无需任何额外的代码。
在 第六章：通用模块更深入 中描述的文本编辑器项目中，学生必须实现一种选择文本以及复制或删除所选内容的机制。大多数学生在他们的选择实现中引入了状态变量，以表明选择是否存在。他们之所以选择这种方法，是因为有时屏幕上看不到任何选择，因此在实现中似乎很自然地代表了这一概念。但是，这种方法导致大量检查以检测“无选择”条件并进行特殊处理。
通过消除“不选择”的特殊情况，可以简化选择处理代码，从而使选择始终存在。当屏幕上没有可见的选择时，可以在内部用空的选择表示，其开始和结束位置相同。使用这种方法，可以编写选择管理代码，而无需对“不选择”进行任何检查。复制所选内容时，如果所选内容为空，则将在新位置插入 0 字节（如果正确实现，则在特殊情况下无需检查 0 字节）。同样，应该有可能设计用于删除选择的代码，以便无需任何特殊情况检查就可以处理空情况。在一行上考虑所有选择。要删除选择，提取选择之前的行的一部分，并将其与选择之后的行的部分连接起来以形成新行。如果选择为空，则此方法将重新生成原始行。
此示例还说明了 第七章：不同的层，不同的抽象 中的“不同的层，不同的抽象”概念。“无选择”的概念在用户对应用程序界面的看法方面很有意义，但这并不意味着必须明确表示它在应用程序内部。选择总是存在的，但有时是空的，因此是不可见的，这样可以简化实现。
For the same reason that it makes sense to define errors out of existence, it also makes sense to define other special cases out of existence. Special cases can result in code that is riddled with if statements, which make the code hard to understand and lead to bugs. Thus, special cases should be eliminated wherever possible. The best way to do this is by designing the normal case in a way that automatically handles the special cases without any extra code.
In the text editor project described in Chapter 6, students had to implement a mechanism for selecting text and copying or deleting the selection. Most students introduced a state variable in their selection implementation to indicate whether or not the selection exists. They probably chose this approach because there are times when no selection is visible on the screen, so it seemed natural to represent this notion in the implementation. However, this approach resulted in numerous checks to detect the “no selection” condition and handle it specially.
The selection handling code can be simplified by eliminating the “no selection” special case, so that the selection always exists. When there is no selection visible on the screen, it can be represented internally with an empty selection, whose starting and ending positions are the same. With this approach, the selection management code can be written without any checks for “no selection”. When copying the selection, if the selection is empty then 0 bytes will be inserted at the new location (if implemented correctly, there will be no need to check for 0 bytes as a special case). Similarly, it should be possible to design the code for deleting the selection so that the empty case is handled without any special-case checks. Consider a selection all on a single line. To delete the selection, extract the portion of the line preceding the selection and concatenate it with the portion of the line following the selection to form the new line. If the selection is empty, this approach will regenerate the original line.
This example also illustrates the “different layer, different abstraction” idea from Chapter 7. The notion of “no selection” makes sense in terms of how the user thinks about the application’s interface, but that doesn’t mean it has to be represented explicitly inside the application. Having a selection that always exists, but is sometimes empty and thus invisible, results in a simpler implementation.