Following my last edit, I realized there's a good reason why using a string as a number is not always the same as simply removing the quotes. It's so that if you ask for user input, the user can type "042", or select this value in a form that pads its numbers with 0, and you'll still get the value the user meant to send rather than 34. I guess having "042" != 042 for this reason but "0x16" == 0x16 is more surprising than only having decimal numbers work this way.