Sure but at that point you're talking about external systems anyways, and the same would be true for any identifier they give you. One day that int may change i

Sure but at that point you're talking about external systems anyways, and the same would be true for any identifier they give you. One day that int may change into a raw byte array, string, braille, emoji-encoded[1], you name it. This article is about scenarios where it IS under your control. [1]: https://pypi.org/project/base-emoji/ https://pypi.org/project/base-emoji/