Re: Alternative to ~= for inequality?

[Miles Bader <miles@...>]

Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> writes:
>> Adding a few very minor redundancies (like "!=") to fix historical
>> quirks in Lua isn't "perl-ising."
>
> "Historical quirks" is an interesting characterization. I cut my teeth
> on Pascal, so to me, "!=" is a "historical quirk". Maybe Lua should use
> "<>", which is *much* more obvious than "!=", which to me sounds more
> like "emphatically equal" than "not equal".

I will explain why I use that phrase:

I don't think _any_ of these syntaxes (!=, ~=, <>) is inherently
really much better or worse than the others [welll.... actually I've
never really liked "<>", even though I cut my programming teeth on
BASIC and Pascal!]

What I meant was that if Lua were designed _today_, I expect it would
go with "!=" simply because (1) meh, doesn't really matter, (2) all
the other popular languages these days use !=, and (3) when all else
is equal, there's real benefit from consistency with what people are
already familiar with.

-miles

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