Once upon a time (Tcl 7.x; probably earlier too?) the best way to test for string equality in Tcl was:
if {[string compare $x $y] == 0} ...Beginning with Tcl 8.1.1 the preferred way became:
if {[string equal $x $y]} ...Beginning with Tcl 8.4 and the introduction of the eq and ne operators testing for string equality became much more concise:
if {$x eq $y} ...Much more readable, concise, and less to type. In Tcl 8.5 we get a simillar improvement for testing whether a particular item is a member (or not) of a list:
if {$x in $y} ...Which IMHO is a huge improvement over the former idiom:
if {[lsearch -exact $y $x] != -1} ...Naturally ni is to ne as in is to
eq. And to top it all off, ni is fun to say too.
—Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 05, 2008 at 19:49