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Modelling in the type system has a cost too. You have to digest a lot of text (wrapping & unwrapping, etc.) just to understand that you're passing a length. Comparatively some extra characters in an identifier are basically free and can tossed in anywhere.

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That may be a fair criticism in some cases.

For my toy example I don't think it is because it's generally easy (in the languages I work in) to overload arithmetic operators on types that are basically constrained scalars so there's no explicit wrapping/unwrapping to do when you want to operate on them as if they were plain scalars.

Maybe you could give me an example of the kind of pathological situation you're alluding to?

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