Greater-than sign


The greater-than sign is a mathematical symbol that denotes an inequality between two values. The widely adopted form of two equal-length strokes connecting in an acute angle at the right, , has been found in documents dated as far back as the 1560s. In mathematical writing, the greater-than sign is typically placed between two values being compared and signifies that the first number is greater than the second number. Examples of typical usage include 1.5 > 1 and 1 > −2. Since the development of computer programming languages, the greater-than sign and the less-than sign have been repurposed for a range of uses and operations.

History

The symbols and first appear in Artis Analyticae Praxis ad Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas by Thomas Harriot, which was published posthumously in 1631. The text states: "Signum majoritatis ut a > b significet a majorem quam b" and "Signum minoritatis ut a < b significet a minorem quam b."
According to historian Art Johnson, while Harriot was surveying North America, he saw a Native American with a symbol that resembled the greater-than sign, in both backwards and forwards forms. Johnson says it is likely he developed the two symbols from this symbol.

Computing

The 'greater-than sign' is an original ASCII character.
The Unicode code point is ; this is inherited from the same allocation in ASCII.

Angle brackets

The greater-than sign is sometimes used for an approximation of the closing angle bracket, . The proper Unicode character is. ASCII does not have angular brackets.

Programming language

and C-family languages use the operator to mean "greater than". In Lisp-family languages, is a function used to mean "greater than".
In Coldfusion and Fortran, operator 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,.
In Java, C, and C++, the operator is the right-shift operator. In C++ it is also used to get input from a stream, similar to the C functions and.
In Haskell, the function is a monadic operator. It is used for sequentially composing two actions, discarding any value produced by the first. In that regard, it is like the statement sequencing operator in imperative languages, such as the semicolon in C.
In XPath the operator returns true if the left operand follows the right operand in document order; otherwise it returns false.

Triple greater-than sign

The triple greater-than sign,, is the unsigned-right-shift operator in JavaScript. Three greater-than signs form the distinctive "three chevron prompt" of the firmware console in MicroVAX, VAXstation, and DEC Alpha computers. This is also the default prompt of the Python interactive shell, often seen for code examples that can be executed interactively in the interpreter:

~:$ python
Python 2.7.5
on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print
Hello World
>>>

Greater-than sign with 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 a greater-than-or-equal-to sign.
In BASIC, Lisp-family languages, and C-family languages, operator means "greater than or equal to". In Sinclair BASIC it is encoded as a single-byte code point token.
In Fortran, operator means "greater than or equal to".
In Bourne shell and Windows PowerShell, the operator means "greater than or equal to".
In LUA, operator means "greater than or equal to" and is used like this

x = math.random
y = 5
if x >= y then
print is more or equal to y
else
print is less than y
end

expected output:
x is more or equal to y
or
x is less than y

Hyphen-minus with greater-than sign

In some programming languages, the greater-than sign is used in conjunction with a hyphen-minus to create an arrow. Arrows like these could also be used in text where other arrow symbols are unavailable. In the R programming language, this can be used as the right assignment operator. In the C, C++, and C# programming languages, this is used as a member access operator.

Shell scripts

In Bourne shell, greater-than sign is used to redirect output to a file. Greater-than plus ampersand is used to redirect to a file descriptor.

Spaceship operator

Greater-than sign is used in the 'spaceship operator',.

HTML

In HTML, the greater-than sign is used at the end of tags. The greater-than sign may be included with, while produces the greater-than or equal to sign.

E-mail and the Internet

The greater-than sign is used to denote quotations in the e-mail and newsgroup formats, and this has been taken into use also in forums. It is also used before a sentence for a sense of implication.