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And there is nothing wrong with writing generic code like that! Just because you can access the specific representation of the underlying data, that does not mean you have to or would do so routinely. In languages that do tend to expose simple data structures directly, it is still normal to provide standardised tools for accessing and manipulating them, and most of the time that is probably still how you would interact with them.

Regarding your second example, if you are working with an explicit representation then you simply would not make a breaking change like that. Instead you would create a new data structure with the new representation, which other code can then choose to use instead if it wants to. Again, nothing about this prevents both versions from also providing equivalent functions to access them in the same way where that makes sense or writing other code in terms of those functions rather than tied directly to the specific implementation.