std::string - how is this working?

[John E]

Firstly, is std::string the same thing as basic_string? The reason I'm asking is that I can never find anything on MSDN about std::string - but basic_string seems very similar.

Anyway, here's my question - Yesterday I was looking at some code that I wrote a long time ago. It does some string comparisons and I realised that I should probably have written something like this:-

#include <string>

using namespace std;

void MyFunc ( string someString, char* compareString )
{
    if ( 0 == someString.compare( string( compareString )))
        ; do something here....
}

whereas in fact, I did it this way:-

#include <string>

using namespace std;

void MyFunc ( string someString, char* compareString )
{
    if ( someString == compareString )
        ; do something here....
}

That code appears to work just fine - even though this MSDN article seems to suggest that basic_string has no equality operators.

Am I looking at the wrong MSDN article? Or is it out of date? Or have I somehow been kidding myself all these years and the code doesn't really work??