Talk:equal sign

Pedant's note: The equals sign is not used for assignment in computer programs. The assignment operator is. In some programming languages, eg, BASIC, the assignment and equality operators are both denoted by the equals sign, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

There is already an entry for "equals sign". Could "equal sign" not just be cross-referenced there?

One further point: the equals sign is not a punctuation mark. The "msg:punctuation" block does not belong here. -- Paul G 06:42, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

If equals sign also exists (I don't see it...?), one should reference the other to prevent duplication of entries. I'm not sure which is dominant. (Aside: They're variant forms but not variant spellings: 2 + 2 = 4 could be read two and two equal four or two plus two equals four, thus = could be the sign for either "equal" or "equals". I don't know how best to mark such a variation, which is similar but not equal to airplane vs aeroplane. =Alternate form= maybe?)

As for Template:Punctuation, I take all kinds of issue with its suitability but I'm not entirely sure how best to go about improving it, or whether it should be removed from the wiki entirely. (However, I do think that as long as equal sign is listed in it, it should be listed in equal sign.) —Muke Tever 08:07, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

My mistake - I thought "equals sign" existed already and didn't check.

I checked with a print dictionary (Chambers, 1998) and it has both "equal sign" and "equals sign", giving them equal weight and currency. I suppose the two exist because the final 's' of "equals" blends into the initial 's' of "sign".

Google gives 82,500 hits for "equal sign" and 49,000 for "equals sign"; on the basis of that, "equals sign" would point to "equal sign". Google is not authoritative, of course, and so some other corpus ought to be checked before this decision is made. -- Paul G 08:52, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)