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 encoded as a single-byte code point token. In Fortran, operator .LE. means "less than or equal to". In Bourne shell and Windows PowerShell, the operator -le means "less than or equal to". In the R programming language, the less-than sign is used in conjunction with a hyphen-minus to create an arrow (codice_1), this can be used as the left assignment operator. 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. Less-than sign is used in the spaceship operator. In HTML