Actually the "everything is (virtually) a string" approach has some beneficial effects. Keeping the underlying data structures compatible with this leads to us

Actually the "everything is (virtually) a string" approach has some beneficial effects. Keeping the underlying data structures compatible with this leads to using immutable values with copy-on-write, giving a very clean predictable semantics. I remember being shocked to discover that this did not apply in Python, where a value (not a variable) being used in one place can be modified by code elsewhere.