Sure. There are actually three implied reasons. The first is that zeros are simply easier to see and verify the presence of in an article than a blob of spaces are. The second is to show a bit of flexibility of using different characters, the more common of which is "0". The third is that "a lot of people" have to produce output for fixed length files and the numeric fields need to be left-padded with zeros, something that the already slower STR() doesn't do without extra code. Those weren't specifically mentioned in the article because I didn't want to distract folks from the main purposes of the article. As with any article, there is the potential for casual learning. Hopefully, even beginners will immediately understand that you should simply replace the zeros with spaces to make the output like that of the STR() function.