Returns true if a and b are not equal. The check depends on the data types of parameters a and b.

If both arguments are of type String, the comparison is performed. If one argument is of type Boolean, the other one will be converted to Boolean and a Boolean comparison is done. In all other cases a numeric comparison will be performed using BigDecimal. Dates and Timestamps are converted to 'Unix time', i.e. the number of milliseconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 in order to compare them numerically.