Breakup of "

I blog about R programming language and the assignment operator for R language is “<-” . A problem that bugs me a lot is wordpress will break <- into < -, no matter in the text body or enclosed by html pre tag. One trick that I have been used is to add a comment to my code and put a <- for wordpress to break. This trick works fine in some situations but it may break other HTML tag in the post.

Is there any way to stop wordpress from breaking up <- into < – ?