Using non-ascii symbols

[Peter Hansen]

Dave Hansen wrote:
> C uses ! as a unary logical "not" operator, so != for "not equal" just
> seems to follow, um, logically.
> 
> Pascal used <>, which intuitively (to me, anyway ;-) read "less than
> or greater than," i.e., "not equal."  

For quantitative data, anyway, or things which can be ordered consistently.

It's unclear to me how well this concept maps to other sorts of data. 
Complex numbers, for example.

I think "not equal", at least the way our brains handle it in general, 
is not equivalent to "less than or greater than".

That is, I think the concept "not equal" is less than or greater than 
the concept "less than or greater than".  <wink>

-Peter