Less-than sign been repurposed for a range of uses and operations. The less-than sign (<) is an original ASCII character (hex 3C, decimal 60). The less-than sign is used for an approximation of the opening angle bracket (⟨). ASCII does not have angle brackets. In BASIC, Lisp-family languages, and C-family languages (including Java and C++), operator < means "less than". In Coldfusion, operator .lt. means "less than". In Fortran, operator .LT. means "less than"; later versions allow <. In Bourne shell, operator -lt means "less than". The double less-than sign («) is used for an approximation of the much-less-than sign (≪) or
Less-than sign is used to denote the beginning of a heredoc statement (where OUTPUT is an arbitrary named variable.) In Bash, «<word is used as a "here string", where word is expanded and supplied to the command on its standard input, similar to a heredoc. 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 a less-than-or-equal-to sign, but Unicode defines it at code point U+2264. In BASIC, Lisp-family languages, and C-family languages (including Java and C++), operator <= means "less than or equal to". In Sinclair BASIC it is