I can say that I am not particularly concerned with compile-time range checking. I agree with you that it is a massive headache that is almost always a huge waste of time. Even in dependently-typed languages, tracking ranges and bounds ends up requiring an incredible amount of bookkeeping that definitely does not seem worth the effort in the vast majority of application code.

When I wrote this blog post, I used a very simple datatype because it was an extraordinarily simple example, but given many of the comments here, it seems it may have been too simple (and thus too contrived). It is only an illustration; don’t read into it too much.