Maybe I haven't been reading closely enough, but I've never seen that before. I must say that I find that counter-intuitive, as you did initially. I don't see the need for additional code that exists only to validate earlier code where you want to guard against making a coding mistake - does that make sense? Just bite the bullet and learn that "==" is to compare numbers. peppiv did the right thing posting his question here - someone will see the error, even if you can't ;-)