ASCII 62 — >

The greater-than sign is a comparison operator with critical roles in markup and shell scripting. In HTML and XML, '>' closes element tags and must be escaped as &gt; when used as literal text content. In Unix shells, '>' redirects stdout to a file (overwriting contents), while '>>' appends instead. In email and forum conventions, '>' prefixes lines of quoted text from previous messages. In C++ template syntax, nested closing brackets like 'vector<vector<int>>' historically required a space before C++11 resolved the parsing ambiguity.

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, Greater-Than Sign is assigned code point 62 in decimal (0x3E hexadecimal, 076 octal, 00111110 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 Greater-Than Sign works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.