(Perhaps unfortunately) The "x" command in the Perl debugger determines whether to put quotes around a value based on whether the value matches /^\d+(\.\d*)?\Z/ (see dumpvar.pl), not based at all on whether or not Perl considers the value to be a string, a number (of one of several types), or both. For example:

  DB<1> x -1
0  '-1'
  DB<2> x 1e19
0  '1e+019'
  DB<3> x "123"
0  123
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"Go figure."

                - tye