looked up 'tilde' and MSI on Google, it looks as though COND_I* actually relates to strings, as it seems that the tilde means 'case insensitive', but I wonder if it has been inadvertently used on integer comparisons by some installers].
Coming from perl, I though the tilde was part of a regex at first.
~>= being similar to COND_ILE =~ m/>=/