Equals sign

In his book Recorde explains his design of the "Gemowe lines" (meaning twin lines, from the Latin gemellus)[5] And to auoide the tediouſe repetition of theſe woordes : is equalle to : I will ſette as I doe often in woorke vſe, a paire of paralleles, or Gemowe lines of one lengthe, thus: =, bicauſe noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle.

The symbol || was used by some and æ (or œ), from the Latin word aequalis meaning equal, was widely used into the 1700s" (History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews).

This somewhat resembles the use of = in a mathematical definition, but with different semantics: the expression following = is evaluated first, and may refer to a previous value of X.

A rival programming-language usage was pioneered by the original version of ALGOL, which was designed in 1958 and implemented in 1960.

ALGOL included a relational operator that tested for equality, allowing constructions like if x = 2 with essentially the same meaning of = as the conditional usage in mathematics.

But = is used for equality and not assignment in the Pascal family, Ada, Eiffel, APL, and other languages.

Following ALGOL, most languages that use = for equality use := for assignment, although APL, with its special character set, uses a left-pointing arrow.

[10] The equal sign is also used as a grammatical tone letter in the orthographies of Budu in the Congo-Kinshasa, in Krumen, Mwan and Dan in the Ivory Coast.

A possibly unique case of the equal sign of European usage in a person's name, specifically in a double-barreled name, was by pioneer aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, as he is also known not only to have often used a double hyphen ⹀ resembling an equal sign = between his two surnames in place of a hyphen, but also seems to have personally preferred that practice, to display equal respect for his father's French ethnicity and the Brazilian ethnicity of his mother.

In Ojibwe, the readily available equal sign on most keyboards is commonly used as a substitute for a double hyphen.

[citation needed] Symbols used to denote items that are approximately equal include the following:[17] In some areas of East Asia such as Japan, "≒" is used to mean "the two terms are almost equal", but in other areas and specialized literature such as mathematics, "≃" is often used.

Equality of truth values (through bi-implication or logical equivalence), may be denoted by various symbols including =, ~, and ⇔.

If interpreted strictly as it says, it would imply that A correct version of the argument would be This difficulty results from subtly different uses of the sign in education.

Starting in algebra courses, the sign takes on a relational meaning of equality between two calculations.