Relational operator
programming language construct or operator that tests or defines some kind of relation between two entities
In computer science, a relational operator is a programming language construct or operator that defines syntactically a relationship between two entities. These include numerical equality (e.g., 5 = 5) and inequalities (e.g., 4 ≥ 3).
In programming languages that include a distinct boolean data type in their type system, like Pascal, Ada, Python or Java, these operators usually evaluate to true or false, depending on if the conditional relationship between the two operands holds or not.
In languages such as C, relational operators return the integers 0 or 1, where 0 stands for false and any non-zero value stands for true.
An expression created using a relational operator forms what is termed a relational expression or a condition. Relational operators can be seen as special cases of logical predicates.
Equality
Usage
Equality is used in many programming language constructs and data types. It is used to test if an element already exists in a set, or to access to a value through a key. It is used in switch statements to dispatch the control flow to the correct branch, and during the unification process in logic programming.
There can be multiple valid definitions of equality, and any particular language might adopt one or more of them, depending on various design aspects.
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