[Arnavion]

If the service doesn't send you back a string it doesn't send you back a string. End of story. You're continuously trying to complicate the issue by insisting that they're sending strings and that the client needs to guess their encoding. They are not and it does not.

[tyingq]

Encoding was one example. But "string" is language dependent aside from encoding. Strong typing doesn't solve the inherent issue.

[teddyh]

Strong typing never “solved” anything, except that is forces you to see the problem and solve it yourself, explicitly, instead of relying on weak typing to fudge the types for you.

[tyingq]

Maybe. Ambiguity means some random bags of bytes pass as more than one type.

[teddyh]

And the "Any" type covereth a multitude of sins.