I'm much surprised by the programmer's comments.

I must confess that I am not much into Perl internals, but a quick test program did not convince me. Try this:

$number=1082021975087815;
$string="1082021975087815";
$converted="$number";
print "$number\n$string\n$converted\n";
[download]

Output:

1.08202197508782e+015
1082021975087815
1.08202197508782e+015
[download]

Wrapping the variable in "" does not impose string context if beforehand the damage was already done. One should rather make sure that initially the number was stored as a string (by putting it in " " or ' ') and then do only string-like operations on this variable.