Mixing Number and String

A recent post has gotten somewhat popular on the web and is something many of us could somewhat relate with. In the case of many including the author, the issue stems from how YAML treats strings and numbers. As a rule of thumb, I would always suggest avoiding any potential confusion by always adding the quotes around a string to ensure the value is treated as a string as intended. The crux of the post was how their Git commit inconveniently happened to be 556474e378 which is very rare to obtain. Recall that scientific notation is in the form of \d+(\.\d+)?E-?\d+ such as 8.5E-10 to refer to 8.5 x 10^-10. The issue that one may encounter when mixing numbers and strings is that things can go very unexpected like the author did whereby 556474e378 was treated as 556474 x 10³⁷⁸. While I do not have any specific examples in mind when I have encountered such issues, I definitely have encountered this issue before where I mixed up a string and a number and obtained an undesired behavior. However, I do not think I ever encountered an issue where my numbers were interpreted as scientific notations.