Computing

The greater-than sign (>) is an original ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

 character (hex 3E, decimal 62).

Angle brackets

The greater-than sign is used for an approximation of the closing angle bracket

Bracket

Brackets are tall punctuation marks used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. In the United States, "bracket" usually refers specifically to the "square" or "box" type.-List of types:...

 (⟩). ASCII does not have angular brackets.

Programming language

BASIC

BASIC

BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....

 and C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

-family languages, (including Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 and C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

) use the operator > to mean "greater than". In Lisp-family languages, > is a function used to mean "greater than".

In Coldfusion

ColdFusion

In computing, ColdFusion is the name of a commercial rapid application development platform invented by Jeremy and JJ Allaire in 1995. ColdFusion was originally designed to make it easier to connect simple HTML pages to a database, by version 2 it had...

 and Fortran

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

, operator .GT. means "greater than".

Double greater-than sign

The double greater-than sign (>>) is used for an approximation of the much greater than sign (≫). ASCII does not have the much greater-than sign.

The double greater-than sign (>>) is also used for an approximation of the closing guillemet

Guillemets

Guillemets , also called angle quotes, are line segments, pointed as if arrows , sometimes forming a complementary set of punctuation marks used as a form of quotation mark....

 (»). ASCII does not have guillemets.

In Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, and C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, the operator >> is the right-shift operator. In C++ it is also used to get input from a stream, similar to the C functions getchar and fgets.

Greater-than sign plus equals sign

The greater-than sign plus the equals sign (>=) is used for an approximation of the greater than or equal to sign (≥). ASCII does not have greater-than-or-equal-to sign.

In BASIC

BASIC

BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....

, Lisp-family languages, and C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

-family languages (including Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 and C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

), operator >= means "greater than or equal to".

In Fortran

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

, operator .GE. means "greater than or equal to".

Shell scripts

In Bourne shell

Bourne shell

The Bourne shell, or sh, was the default Unix shell of Unix Version 7 and most Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh - which will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic link or hard link to a compatible shell - even when more modern shells are used by most users.Developed by Stephen Bourne at AT&T...

 (and many other shells), greater-than sign is used to redirect

Redirection (Unix)

In computing, redirection is a function common to most command-line interpreters, including the various Unix shells that can redirect standard streams to user-specified locations....

 output to a file. Greater-than plus ampersand (>&) is used to redirect to a file descriptor

File descriptor

In computer programming, a file descriptor is an abstract indicator for accessing a file. The term is generally used in POSIX operating systems...

.

HTML

In HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 (and SGML and XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

), the greater-than sign is used at the end of tags. The greater-than sign may be included with >.

Electronic mail

The greater-than sign is used to denote quotation

Quotation

A quotation or quote is the repetition of one expression as part of another one, particularly when the quoted expression is well-known or explicitly attributed by citation to its original source, and it is indicated by quotation marks.A quotation can also refer to the repeated use of units of any...

s in the e-mail

E-mail

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 and newsgroup

Newsgroup

A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...

 formats, and this has been taken into use also in forums.

See also

• Inequality (mathematics)
• Less-than sign
• Relational operator
  Relational operator
  In computer science, a relational operator is a programming language construct or operator that tests or defines some kind of relation between two entities. These include numerical equality and inequalities...
  
  
• Much-greater-than sign