Less-than sign

Computing

The less-than sign (<) is an original ASCII character (hex 3C, decimal 60).

Angle brackets

Programming language

In BASIC, operator < means "less than".

In C, operator < means "less than".

In Fortran, operator .LT. means "less than".

In Java, operator < means "less than".

In Lisp, function called < means "less than".

In Windows PowerShell, operator -lt means "less than".

In PHP, operator -lt means "less than".

Double less-than sign

The double less-than sign (<<) is used for an approximation of the much-less-than sign (≿). ASCII does not have much-less-than sign.

The double less-than sign (<<) is used for an approximation of the opening guillemet («). ASCII does not have guillemets.

In C, operator << is the left-shift operator.

In C++, operator << is the left-shift operator. It is also used to put input to a stream, similar to the C functions putchar and fputs.

In Java, operator << is the left-shift operator.

Less-than sign plus equals sign

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

In BASIC, operator <= means "less than or equal to".

In C, operator <= means "less than or equal to".

In Fortran, operator .LE. means "less than or equal to".

In Java, operator <= means "less than or equal to".

In Lisp, function called <= means "less than or equal to".

In Windows PowerShell, operator -le means "less than or equal to".

In PHP, operator -le means "less than or equal to".

Shell scripts

In Bourne shell (and many other shells), less-than sign is used to redirect input from a file. Less-than plus ampersand (<&) is used to redirect from a file descriptor.

Spaceship operator

Less-than sign is used in the spaceship operator.

HTML

In HTML (and SGML and XML), the less-than sign is used at the beginning of tags. The less-than sign may be included with &lt;.

See also

• Less-than-or-equal-to sign
• Greater-than sign
• Relational operator
• Much-less-than sign