# for historical reasons, != and == are converted to ne and eq to perform 
# stringwise comparison (mainly because it doesn't generate "non-numerical 
# comparison" warnings which != and == can) but the others (e.g. < > <= >=)
# are not converted to their stringwise equivalents.  I added 'gt' et al, 
# briefly for v2.04d and then took them out again in 2.04e.