Greater-than sign
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[edit] Computing
The greater-than sign (>) is an original ASCII character (hex 3E, decimal 62).
[edit] Angle brackets
The greater-than sign is used for an approximation of the closing angle bracket (⟩). ASCII does not have angular brackets.
[edit] Programming language
BASIC and C-family languages, (including Java and C++) use the operator > to mean "greater than". In Lisp-family languages, > is a function used to mean "greater than".
In Coldfusion and Fortran, operator .GT. means "greater than".
[edit] 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 (»). ASCII does not have guillemets.
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 getchar and fgets.
[edit] 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, Lisp-family languages, and C-family languages (including Java and C++), operator >= means "greater than or equal to".
In Fortran, operator .GE. means "greater than or equal to".
[edit] Shell scripts
In Bourne shell (and many other shells), greater-than sign is used to redirect output to a file. Greater-than plus ampersand (>&) is used to redirect to a file descriptor.
[edit] Spaceship operator
Greater-than sign is used in the spaceship operator.
[edit] HTML
In HTML (and SGML and XML), the greater-than sign is used at the end of tags. The greater-than sign may be included with >.
[edit] Electronic mail
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.
[edit] Internet forums
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From the use of the sign for quotations from previous messages, an usage has evolved where the "quoted" text is a self-quotation, particularly a narrative, hypothetical or otherwise. Likewise, another common usage is to reinterpret and then quote other users' text or actions, usually in a pejorative or mocking fashion (e.g: >implying you will get dubs). The usage of the greater-than sign is colloquially known as "greentexting" for the green color that many imageboard software packages apply to sentences beginning with the greater-than sign. It has described[by whom?] as a subtle art, much like trolling, that is easy to learn, but nearly impossible to master.
