Answer from cs61c-al (Phillip Chin 16156822) for Question 1
Since data is almost all the same, it is easily to get the underlying representation and to manipulate the data. Data is almost universal. It can be used in anyway like in C. It doesn't really check the types because they can  all be swtiched because they are essentially the same. I think one way around it is having data that is more strongly typed like that is found in java. By creating objects and such the data is more unique and therefore harder to manipulate. The tradeoff maybe in designing something complicated, it would probably take more time and would make something simple a lot harder to understand.