>>last 15 years
Wow, I have just programming for about 2 yrs on/off so you have a lot more knowledge than me. Nevertheless I would still like to debate even though if I may be wrong, if that's OK with you.

>>Well, if that is the case ...<snipped>
<<

I see what you mean, let me rephrase what I meant to say, my words
weren't being clear. A reason why a person might use "!=" versus
"<" would rely mainly in its context. For example, != is more general
when iterating through a container, as not all iterator define the <
operator. For example, vector and map would work with != but not <
operator in C++. But I do not mean that != is more general than <
every time nor should it be used in cases like you have shown. To
answer the question for javaAddict, i used != because in a for loop it
might be more general at times, and just thought I would switch it up
a bit.

>>
Also, c++ calls generic types template types.
<<
Yea, but I was talking about generic in a sense of overall not just meta programming, sorry I should have been more clear, again.

Well, you seem to know a lot more after 2 years than I did. As a comparitor, we typically know how operators behave on primitive types. But I think we both have the same understanding when the types are complex. An equals sign can't "magically" grab all of the data an object has and figure out if they are equal or not. That has to be implemented somewhere.
I was just digressing more out of boredom than anything. I guess I'm like a baseball purist when it comes to programming. Plus, 98 percent of all my coding errors come from improperly implemented loop conditions. As a matter of fact, that reminds me. I have some bugs to clean up. Hopefully LKH figured out how to implement his / her multiplication table.