less-than sign

The less-than sign may be included with .

Less-than sign is used in the spaceship operator.

The less-than sign is a sign of inequality.

The less-than sign is used for an approximation of the opening angle bracket ( ).

In Bourne shell (and many other shells), less-than sign is used to redirect input from a file.

In HTML (and SGML and XML), the less-than sign is used at the beginning of tags.

In terms of ambiguity, BNF's metanotation generates unnecessary complexity when quotation marks, apostrophes, less-than signs or greater-than signs come to serve as terminal symbols, which they often do.

Although it looks like it in many fonts (including the one used in The Unicode Standard), we would really prefer it to be something to do with LESS-THAN SIGN and EQUALS SIGN, because that reflects the real meaning.

That is, for example, in sites where you allow users to submit their own content, for example, you don't want to allow a user to submit a less-than sign or a greater-than sign because that allows you to bracket some keywords like an href, a link reference, or to invoke scripting or play other games.