Personally, I agree. I hate "!="; to me <> looks much better and I use it all the time. Guido has been known to disagree with me so violently that he'll make a patch to my code just to change that. :) http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/python/dist/src/Lib/smtpd.py?rev=1.4&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=python -Barry