[gmueckl]

I am not imagining problems that don't exist in the application domains I work on.

If your environment is so relaxed that aspects like signedness of an integer don't matter, so be it. But then you are also far removed from a domain where software correctness is non-negotiable.

[scarface74]

It’s not aspects “like signednes” that’s the only constraint that you could embed in your defined POCO and still use as a select projection that would survive a LINQ expression that was turned into an expression tree. Your data store would enforce the other constraints. Your C style character array as a string wouldn’t work with either LINQ nor any of the standard library.

Are you really trying to go back to the bad old days with Microsoft C/MFC/WIN32/COM where you had over a dozen ways to represent a string that you had to convert to and from depending on which API you were using?