I've actually seen this before and didn't realize this is exactly what the goal was. I just thought it was noise. In fact, just today I wrote a function that accepted three string arguments and was trying to decide if I should force the caller to parse them into some specific types, or do so in the function body and throw an error, or just live with it. This is exactly the solution I needed (because I actually don't NEED the parsed values.)

This is going to have the biggest impact on my coding style this year.