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Wikipedia says:

Not equal

The symbol used to denote inequation — when items are not equal — is a slashed equals sign "≠" (Unicode 2260).

Most programming languages, limiting themselves to the ASCII character set, use ~=, !=, /=, =/=, or <> to represent their boolean inequality operator.

All of these operators can be found in this table, apart from =/=. I can find this equals-slash-equals used as a way of formatting ≠ in plaintext but not in any programming language.

Has =/= been used as the inequality operator in any programming language?

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It might help if you explain why you care, what problem you're trying to solve. "any programming language" is a pretty wide field; it seems likely that there was some language somewhere in the history of computing that used =/=, but not so likely that a well-known language does. It'd be simple enough to create a language that accepts =/= for not equal, but I don't expect that'd help. So... why do you care, and how is this question constructive? – Caleb Nov 7 '11 at 10:51
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It's not used because not only does it require 3 characters instead of 2 (!=) it's also a really ugly way to represent the slashed equals sign. – Ben Brocka Nov 7 '11 at 13:27

2 Answers

up vote 13 down vote accepted

Yes, it is in Erlang. =/= means exactly not equal to, that would be somewhat equivalent to !==.

See more subtle differences (such as =< instead of <=) here: http://www.erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/expressions.html#id198443

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So all erlang code is sad =< >= everyone else's is happy <= => – Doug T. Nov 7 '11 at 22:47
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In the long list of languages that don't use =/=, PROLOG uses X =\= Y as "the values X and Y are not equal", as opposed to the equality operator =:=. (Equality, not to be confused with the unification operator =!)

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