• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2025

help-circle

  • I have an education in compsci, and I have worked in software engineering and platform engineering for 8 years now… And I only know of one programming language that makes use of “=/=” which is Erlang. Every other language or scientific papers I know of make use different operators.

    Prolog comes close with “==”, and Haskell too with “/=”, but every other language has either used “!=”, “~=” or “<>”. The papers I have read that go for a more pseudo-code or mathematical notation has always used “≠”.


  • To some extent the SQL syntax also kind of makes sense… It’s a combination of both “greater than” and “smaller than” operators, which is kind of a different way of saying something is not equal.

    The “!=” comes from most programming languages using the “!” character for negation. Negating something is usually read and pronounced “not”. So it literally reads “not equal” if you are reading the symbols.