"decimal (string) representation."

Someone else may also be slipping into confusion here... ;-)

A string representation is not necessarily in decimal notation!
You could format your string to display binary, decimal, Roman Numerals or anything.

A string is simply a printable/displayable text representation - as opposed to the underlying number

http://www.8052.com/forum/read.phtml?id=11223
http://www.8052.com/forum/read.phtml?id=15155