We crossed posts. I put that in an edit to my last post 10 minutes ago. I was hoping I did it before anyone had time to reply. You're just too fast!
The documentation does not read like IsNumber is a requirement, but it appears to be. I'll have to go to the Wish List forum and put in a vote for Val(string).
It also seems that when an EditText view is set to NUMBERS for Input Type, the value returned should be a number instead of a string, but maybe there is some practical reason for returning a string that I'm not considering.
EditText.Text is always a string. The compiler automatically adds the code required to parse the string as a number when needed.
If the EditText.Text is empty or contains any string value that cannot be parsed as a number it will throw an error. IsNumber is a safety check to make sure that the value can be parsed correctly.