[MrManatee]

I don’t know how universal this is, but at least in my mind there is a clear semantic difference between 123 and "123". 123 is a number in the mathematical sense, maybe counting or measuring something. It probably makes sense to do arithmetic on it (addition, multiplication, etc.). "123" is a number in the other sense: some kind of identifier that happens to consist of numerical digits; something like a phone number, zip code, serial number, etc. It doesn’t make sense to perform arithmetic with it. And if it happens to begin with a "+" or a "0" then it’s not ok to just drop that character.