>>>>>>I guess, being a lazy person <g>, I was looking for a all-inclusive "<>" "exact" operator. That way I would not have to worry about SET EXACT OFF or ON and simply use "==" when comparing for equal and "<==> ((c) Copyright Dmitry Litvak <g>) for not equal.
>>>>>
>>>>>Your all-inclusive operation is "NOT a == b"
>>>>
>>>>But Sergey said not to use it <g>.
>>>
>>>I didn't say that. I said that it's preferable than flipping SET EXACT around which could cause hard to trace bugs in other parts of application..
>>
>>Keeping SET EXACT ON makes clean distinction for Seek(), so I prefer it this way.
>
>Well that sounds like a candidate for a standard! We're all in agreement. :)

Except that Exact Off is the default, and I guess 99% of Fox programmers never changed it across the board. So, your candidate doesn't have much chance in the real world out there, he already lost.

I've worked on one case where it WAS the standard, and it bit me a few times. I would, for instance, try to compare two strings where the left one was longer, and it kept returning .f. simply because they weren't strictly equal. I actually had to know the length of the right string, and apply "if left(leftstring, len(rightstring))=rightstring" to get what I would get with "if leftstring=rightstring" using Exact Off.

It was the same puzzle I had to deal with, in the other direction, when I switched from Cobol (and other languages) to Fox.