Does the Windows platform lack the doesn’t-equals sign? Is this possible?
I program in FileMaker, mainly via my Macintosh, and I’m constantly using Option-equals to create the equals-sign-with-a-slash through it:
? <-- that’s it, if vBulletin and/or your web browser and/or your operating system don’t screw with it
So I open the same calculation defs and scripts on the PC and instead of the doesn’t-equals sign, it displays “<>” – ?
And here on the message board I’m constantly seeing people use the convention exclamation-point-equals (!=) to mean doesn’t equals.
Is there truly no Alt-#### code for entering the equals sign with a slash through it on the PC? Why the heck not?
This is not authoritative, I’m pretty much speculating here but here’s my interpretation.
The history of the character set goes way back to teletype machines and typewriters. The ASCII character set has 128 characters including a null character. There are another 128 available as “Extended-ASCII” that were added later. Given the very limited number of characters available, the designers probably decided that it wasn’t worthwhile to include a symbol whose only meaning could easily be conveyed by using two other essential symbols, “<” and “>”.
Once the original 128 character set was established, there were significant amounts of code written using the existing symbols, so there was no great demand to add the single inequality operator. It would be difficult to type since it wasn’t a standard keyboard element (hence your need to use Option-= to get it on the Mac) and its meaning was already handled. If it were added to the standard character set, say when extended ASCII was implemented, that would not obligate compilers to accept it as part of their language. So as tomndebb mention, it can be typed into a Windows program but it probably won’t be understood by the compiler or whatever other programming environment is in use.
The != operator came to us from C, which also uses == rather than = as its equality operator. PASCAL on the other hand uses := for “assign to” but = for equality and <> for inequality. For yet another example, FORTRAN used .NE. and .EQ. as its inequality and equality operators. I’ve also heard that some languages with # being used as an inequality operator. There are lots af variations but they’re all easily typeable without resorting to characters that don’t exist on a standard keyboard. I suspect that the MAC provides the inequality sign as a nicety but it would work just as well if you typed <> into Filemaker.
So do fonts in Windows (Arial, let’s say) fail to have that character altogether, or do they have it but there’s no way to enter it when you’re typing?
Here is a quick peek at the character set of Arial as the Macintosh knows it.
Do fonts have characters under Windows that are inaccessible to the Macintosh? Are the fonts themselves different? (I thought they were identical other than format; I’ve been using TTConverter to “Mac-ify” PC fonts or turn Mac fonts into PC “.TTF” files for years under that assumption).
Other fonts also support the “not equals” sign.
The best way to get at it is to use the Character Map tool. Choose the font you want, then choose the subset called “Mathematical Operators”. The “not equals” is unicode 2260 in a number of the fonts I tried. Some didn’t support it at all, though. I’m not sure how to enter it from the keyboard.
Since the question has been asked and answered, I’ll just throw a comment likely to get this tossed to GD (or the pit). Have you noticed that the platform people use dictates the tone of the questions they ask?
Unix user: How do you do X?
Mac user: How do you do X?
PC user: Does windows really not support X? How lame is that?
If the asker of the PC question is a native *nix or Mac user, insert appropriate righteous indignation on top of the presumption that X is not possible on a PC.
I checked the Arial character set in Windows and it looks somewhat different from the one shown in the MAC image. I don’t have a web server set up so I can’t post an image – can anyone else oblige? As I mentioned before though, the fact that a character can be typed in a document doesn’t mean that it can be actually understood by a compiler or other programming environment. Of the programming languages I’m familiar with, none support the inequality sign.
