That is exactly what would be required and it is not at all good.  People in user space should not have to even know that there are single and double precision floating point representations in order to set the frequency of an instrument.  Especially not from a language environment where the distinction does not even exist!  And it will afflict not only Lisps and dialects but SmallTalks and dialects and MLs and dialects and so on.  I don't know the Patcher dialects but I imagine things would be as bad if not worse. It loses straight up for variable arity messages, (apply ->  "/n_setn" node 0 data-from-somewhere). And even from C like languages users still need to *remember* for every OSC message they ever want to send whether '/frequency' is required as a single or double precision real number, and whether '/midi-note' is required as a 'c' integer, an 'i' integer, an 'f' float, or a 'd' double, all of which are reasonable requirements for different implemntations.   It means that if two synths have a '/global-gain' controller you might need to format two different OSC packets to tell them to be quiet [one with a 'f' zero and one with a 'd' zero].   It means that if a synth implementor decides that the '/phase' input really should be double precision she cannot change the request type from the library because it will break *every existing user* of her synth!  Their single precision phase values are no longer good enough?  Surely at this point the implementor will probably just fix the library to do type coercion or find another library... In the redundant case the coercion adds one integer comparison to the dispatch path per argument, and thoughtful ordering of the coercion table should get most common cases in two or three comparisons; it is not an expensive operation.   And I am still arguing that it is an important aspect of OSC that when a synth advertises a '/freq' message, users can be confident that sending it 440, whether encoded as a 32bit or 64bit integer, or as a 32bit or 64bit float, will likely tune the synth to A440.  OSC is in user space, I think it would be a pity if synths advertised '/freqi', '/freqh', '/freqf' and '/freqd' messages in an attempt to help users out. Regards, Rohan