relational operators

Lua provides the following relational operators:

    <   >   <=  >=  ==  ~=

All these operators always result in true or false.

The operator == tests for equality; the operator ~= is the negation of equality.

If the values are different types they are considered different values. For example, "5" (string type) is not the same as 5 (number type).

Tables, userdata and functions are compared by reference. That is they are considered equal only if they are the same underlying object. Thus two tables, which happen to contain the same things, but which were created separately, are considered different.

Note that the equality test is "==", not just "=". Thus this is incorrect:

if a = 5 then  -- wrong! use a == 5 instead

Also note that the inequality test is "~=", not "!=" as used by the C language.