The author is right, the answer should be a type error. If you want to compare them as ints, convert the string to an int first (and deal with the potential fai

The author is right, the answer should be a type error. If you want to compare them as ints, convert the string to an int first (and deal with the potential failure in the case that the string does not represent an integer). If you want to compare them as strings, convert the int to a string first. There are multiple approaches to transform this invalid comparison into a valid comparison, choose one. Hint: prefer the one that most closely aligns with the abstract meaning of the domain. A point that other commenters brought up is what to do in the case of user input. Lets assume it's unreasonable to expect the user to select a type explicitly. In this case I'd say there are actually three distinct types: int, string, unknown-currently-represented-as-a-string. This doesn't solve the problem of needing to select a type conversion, it just makes it more obvious that a type conversion must occur. This reminds me of Go's const numbers which are actually represented as abstract numbers with arbitrary precision during compilation and only get assigned a concrete value once its assigned to a variable that has a concrete type. This allows, for example, to have an expression using Pi which can be assigned to both float and double that utilizes each type's maximum precision.