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 1631. 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 and . The less-than sign and greater-than sign always "point" to the smaller number. 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 earliest known use of the symbols and is found in (The Analytical Arts Applied to Solving Algebraic Equations) by Thomas Harriot, published posthumously in 1631. The text states " a > b a b (The sign of majority a > b indicates that a is greater than b)" and " a < b a b (The sign of minority a < b indicates that a is less than 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 Harriot developed the two symbols from this symbol. Usage in text markup 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. 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 , while produces the greater-than or equal to sign. E-mail and Markdown In some early e-mail systems, the greater-than sign was used to denote quotations. The sign is also used to denote quotations in Markdown. Usage in programming The 'greater-than sign' is encoded in ASCII as character hex 3E, decimal 62. The Unicode code point is , inherited from ASCII. For use with HTML, the mnemonics or may also be used. Programming language BASIC and C-family languages (including Java and C++) use the comparison 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