Is it better to use NOT or <> when comparing values?

vbscript
Tester101 picture Tester101 · Dec 15, 2008 · Viewed 128.2k times · Source

Is it better to use NOT or to use <> when comparing values in VBScript?
is this:


If NOT value1 = value2 Then

or this:


If value1 <> value2 Then

better?

EDIT: Here is my counterargument.
When looking to logically negate a Boolean value you would use the NOT operator, so this is correct:


 If NOT boolValue1 Then

and when a comparison is made in the case of the first example a Boolean value is returned. either the values are equal True, or they are not False. So using the NOT operator would be appropriate, because you are logically negating a Boolean value.

For readability placing the comparison in parenthesis would probably help.

Answer

Joel Coehoorn picture Joel Coehoorn · Dec 15, 2008

The latter (<>), because the meaning of the former isn't clear unless you have a perfect understanding of the order of operations as it applies to the Not and = operators: a subtlety which is easy to miss.

Related questions

How to set delay in vbscript

How to set delay in vbscript? WScript.Sleep(100) does not work on Windows XP, Vista.

Read More
vbscript output to console

What is the command or the quickest way to output results to console using vbscript?

Read More
Creating and writing lines to a file

Is it possible to create a file and write lines to it in vbscript? Something similar to echo in bat file (echo something something >>sometextfile.txt). On execution of the vbscript depending on the path of the script …

Read More