126. Alphabetic comparison ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ALPHABETIC COMPARISON. Most of you will be familiar with the use of the "<" and ">" operators to compare numbers, but not everyone may be aware that it can be used on strings, thus forming the basis of an alphabetic sort. It is quite legitimate to use an expression like IF A$>B$ THEN GOTO 240 This can be used to compare "SMITH" with "BROWN", and it will decide that "BROWN" is less than "SMITH", because it comes sooner in alphabetical order. Lower case comes after upper, so "SMITH" is less than "Smith" for example. In other words, the comparison is made in ASCII code order. This does mean that when you compare numbers in the form of strings, you get odd results if they do not both contain the same number of digits in front of the decimal point. For example "12" is less than "3" because it starts with a "1" rather than a "3", but "03" will correctly be found to be less than "12". Similarly, ".2" will be less than "0.1", because a fullstop comes before "0" in ASCII code order, but "0.2" rather than ".2" will be compared correctly.