It must be a mathematician thing.  When I am doing something that involves finding a smaller number, I expect to see a &lt; operator.<p>How would this look if you were writing code that dealt with something like a linked list where you have &#x27;cur&#x27; and &#x27;next&#x27;  pointers?  &#x27;cur&#x27; would be &#x27;next&#x27; and &#x27;next would be &#x27;nextNext&#x27; ?