I think I can help with the perspective here,
@Isaac - based on an age consideration.
When Access was first created and as recently as Ac97, computers were still in the many-megaHertz speed range. Internal bus speeds topped out at maybe 66 MHz. Instruction cycles were not as cheap as they are now. Back then, it made a big difference to do conversions. Now, though, you can do gigaHertz operations and a couple of extra instructions to allow for conversions just doesn't make a lot of difference. Therefore, having the $ to force a string return doesn't matter that much. The test for a non-string variable is so short, so brief, that you can usually ignore it.