RE: <> and !=
 

[Don Arnold]
> Out of curiosity, what was the original operator for the equality
> comparison?

'=' was used for both equality comparison and assignment. The ambiguity of
this-- especially at an interactive prompt --soon killed that idea:

>>> a = b

If you look in a current Python source distribution, the script
Demo/scripts/eqfix.py is still left over from the transition!