Best Answer - Chosen by Voters the advantages are when you want to manipulate the data within the variable, for example if it's a string variable then you can split the string into 2 parts search it for an occurrence or a sub string. if it's a floating point one you can define the number of decimal points, add them together, perform maths on them etc, if they are strings for example and you add 4 and 2 the answer would be 42, whle using floating the answer would be 6