Thanks Allen. I've had a read through the forum on the latest golf round. I found a somewhat cryptic post by Jochen about a statement evaluating to true when $ = 0. Is that what you are referring to?

In any case, it seems pretty clear to me that 0 does not equal "a" no matter how you slice it. I did mention a workaround above but I'm afraid that's only useful if you know that the statement on the left hand side is going to equal 0 before the script is run.