Many protocols use some form of self describing data format, for example
ASN.1, XML, S expressions, and bencoding.
Why?
Presumably both ends of the conversation have negotiated what protocol
version they are using (and if they have not, you have big problems) and
when they receive data, they need to get the data they expect. If they
are looking for list of integer pairs, and they get a integer string
pairs, then having them correctly identified as strings is not going to
help much.
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