na

na provides syntactic sugar for constructing primitives recognized as NA. A use case is be:

 Vec[Int](1,2,na,4)

na will implicitly convert to a primitive having the designated missing value bit pattern. That pattern is as follows:

1. byte => Byte.MinValue
2. char => Char.MinValue
3. short => Short.Minvalue
4. int => Int.MinValue
5. long => Long.MinValue
6. float => Float.NaN
7. double => Double.NaN

The NA bit pattern for integral types is MinValue because it induces a symmetry on the remaining bound of values; e.g. the remaining Byte bound is (-127, +127).

Note since Booleans can only take on two values, it has no na primitive bit pattern.