Truncation and Type declaration versus Type Inference for Defaults

We ran into a few bumps recently on a newly upgraded system wherein default variable value were getting truncated because the variables were "declared" as integers (the default), but were given a non-integer default value (e.g. 0.5).

There was an appropriate warning (though these are always easy to miss), but I'm wondering if the "correct" behavior shouldn't be to respect the inferred type of the default value, and warn if it is at odds with the "declared" value, rather than respecting the declaration and overriding the default. At the very least, if we are going to respect the declared value, it probably should be an error, since fractional numbers truncate to 0, leading to subtly strange behavior.

Clearly, MW variables are internally dynamically typed, and it's not 100% clear why we put a type field in the XML in the first place (I think that the original idea was that this could inform how the UI looked; e.g. display increment/decrement buttons, that sort of thing).