"Don't forget that not equals is ~=, the horror."
I get you are taking the piss but ~= is just as logical as != being the symbols for: "not equals", if you've been exposed to some math(s) as well as ... well, ! means factorial, doesn't it?
Syntax is syntax and so is vocabulary! In the end you copy and paste off of Stack Exchange and all is golden 8)
I'm more familiar with CSS than I am with Lua. The syntax for the former has a very different meaning[1].
[attr~=value]
Represents elements with an attribute name of attr whose value is a whitespace-separated list of words, one of which is exactly value.
! is commonly used as the unary not operator, so "a != b" makes sense as a shortcut for "!(a == b)". a not equals b.
But in Lua, the unary not is written as “not”.
For a language apparently inspired from Wirth, one would have expected <> (greater-or-lesser-than). But the real horror, to me, is Windows not letting one disable the so~called "dead keys" easily.
Yeah, 36 years of Unicode and it's still not ‘≠’.
In unicode != on a keyboard
The real gripes should be globals by default and ... nothing. Lua is wonderful.