ASCII 60 — <

The less-than sign is a mathematical comparison operator and a critical structural character in markup languages. In HTML and XML, '<' opens element tags, making it a metacharacter that must be escaped as &lt; in text content to prevent misinterpretation as markup — a requirement fundamental to preventing XSS (cross-site scripting) security vulnerabilities. In C++ and Java, '<' appears in generic and template syntax for parameterized types. In shell scripting, '<' redirects standard input from a file. In many languages, '<<' performs bitwise left shift operations.

Symbol characters in ASCII include mathematical operators, logical notation, and special-purpose marks that serve critical roles across programming, mathematics, and digital communication. Symbols are heavily context-dependent — the same character may act as an arithmetic operator in one language, a regex metacharacter in another, and a shell configuration flag in a third context. This contextual polyvalence makes symbols among the most functionally overloaded characters in computing, requiring careful attention to their meaning in each domain.

In the ASCII encoding table, Less-Than Sign is assigned code point 60 in decimal (0x3C hexadecimal, 074 octal, 00111100 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Less-Than Sign works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.