Creating a mapping between primitive data type and "kind of content" is ad-hoc, arbitrary, and icky. What if you want your reasons to be numeric as well, then t

Creating a mapping between primitive data type and "kind of content" is ad-hoc, arbitrary, and icky. What if you want your reasons to be numeric as well, then the scheme falls apart? What about aggregates, as a sibling comment mentioned? Copy of another comment of mine: I dealt with a large sqlite database once where a past bug had entered data of a different data type. Instead of blowing up when the rows were created or modified, it blowed up in a much harder to debug way much, much later.