A shell convention is that a successful executable should exit with the value 0. Anything else can be interpreted as a failure of some sort, on part of bash or the executable you that just ran. See also $PIPESTATUS and the EXIT STATUS section of the bash man page:
For the shell’s purposes, a command which exits with a zero exit status has succeeded. An exit status of zero indicates success. A non-zero exit status indicates failure. When a command terminates on a fatal signal N, bash uses the value of 128+N as the exit status.
If a command is not found, the child process created to execute it returns a status of 127. If a com-
mand is found but is not executable, the return status is 126.
If a command fails because of an error during expansion or redirection, the exit status is greater than
zero.
Shell builtin commands return a status of 0 (true) if successful, and non-zero (false) if an error
occurs while they execute. All builtins return an exit status of 2 to indicate incorrect usage.
Bash itself returns the exit status of the last command executed, unless a syntax error occurs, in
which case it exits with a non-zero value. See also the exit builtin command below.