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It’s fine, it’s a nightmare with or without street names.

You already shouldn’t assume streets to have names and also accept arbitrary strings.

If you really need something reliable (i.e. it needs to be accepted by an external authority or you will actually deliver goods) you can ask the user for a validated adress from an official source.

The residents of Hilgermissen are quite likely well adapted to entering 'Hilgermissen' as the street name as well as the place in any form that forces it.

https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

Not much worse than zip codes with letters.

Canada says hi.

If you're trying to store numbers that might start with a zero using an integer type, you're doing it wrong anyway. A rule of thumb is to ask yourself the question: what does the result of adding two such values mean?

Does that mean that e.g. numeric user ID should also me strings since adding them is meaningless?

Nothing difficult about zip codes as long as you treat them as strings :)

Relevant Tom Scott: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DSG-zxGRkJw