Since I think this is really important I will give an example, and from the other end of a continuum. I use scheme for most of my music work. Scheme has a very sophisticated numerical tower. I might write (-> "/n_set" 1001 "freq" 440) to set the frequency of an instrument at SC3. The OSC encoder encodes values based on their lisp type, 1001 is an integer and gets encoded as 'i'. Lets assume that to the receiver the frequency argument is a float, here I lose because 440 is an integer. I argue that a receiver implemented like that is just wrong, that an integer 440 frequency is completely valid, and SC3 thankfully agrees and plays the right note.