Bash exit code range

I just learned that bash’s exit codes only go as high as 255. If you go to 256, it loops back around to 0 again. Playing with sed here (the number following the q command tells it to return that particular exit code):

sed '/Steve/q255' file.txt; echo $?

If ‘Steve’ is found in file.txt, return with error code 255. Steve was in the file, so it returned 255 as expected.

Had I done either of these:

sed '/Steve/q257' file.txt; echo $?
sed '/Steve/q264' file.txt; echo $?

It would’ve returned 1 and 8, respectively. Kinda’ interesting.