comparing strings and integers

[beliavsky at aol.com]

Thanks to S. Nowaczyk and others for the helpful replies. If one wants

if (a > b)

to raise an exception when the comparison is not "sensible", maybe an
alternative way of writing it is

if ((a - b) > 0)

This should work when 'a' and 'b' are numerical and will fail if one
is numerical and the other is a string. A down side is that it does
not permit string comparisons, but I rarely compare strings except for
equality in my code.