Greater-than sign

The greater-than sign is sometimes used for an approximation of the closing angle bracket, ⟩ (or "upright chevron"). The proper Unicode character is U+232A 〉 RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET (HTML 〉). ASCII does not have angular brackets.

BASIC and C-family languages (including Java[2] 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".

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 getchar and fgets.

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.[3]

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 (known as the SRM console in the latter). 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 (default, Mar  9 2014, 22:15:05) 
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.0.68)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print("Hello World")
Hello World
>>>

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 (including Java and C++), operator >= means "greater than or equal to". In Sinclair BASIC it is encoded as a single-byte code point token.

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

In Bourne shell and Windows PowerShell, the operator -ge means "greater than or equal to".

In Lua, operator >=means "greater than or equal to" and is used like this

x = math.random(1,9)
y = 5
if x >= y then
    print("x("..x..") is more or equal to y("..y..")")
else
    print("x("..x..") is less than y("..y..")")
end

expected output: x(number >= 5) is more or equal to y(5) or x(number < 5) is less than y(5)

In some programming languages (for example F#), 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. In Swift, it is used to indicate the return value type when defining a function (i.e., func foo() -> MyClass {...}).

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.

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

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.

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. (>implying)