Nil

Nil is a special value denoting the absence of a value, and has the type nil. It is often returned by functions to indicate an error condition, usually along with an error message as the second return value. Such functions include loadfile and loadstring. It is good practice to check if a variable is nil before using it, to prevent errors such as "attempt to call nil" or "attempt to index ? (a nil value)", which will happen when a nil value is used regardless. In the context of tables, setting the value of a key to nil will effectively delete the key.