> Furthermore, I can’t think of a place in code where the generic and comparison use cases of < or > would be ambiguous or even adjacent.
Most languages that use angle brackets for generics (e.g. C++, Rust, Swift) also allow you to explicitly instantiate generics, which leads to a syntactic ambiguity, e.g. is
a < b > (c)
a function call or two comparisons? The usual way to disambiguate in these cases is to check whether b is plausibly a type and treat it as a generic, but this is ugly on a few different levels.
Most languages that use angle brackets for generics (e.g. C++, Rust, Swift) also allow you to explicitly instantiate generics, which leads to a syntactic ambiguity, e.g. is
a function call or two comparisons? The usual way to disambiguate in these cases is to check whether b is plausibly a type and treat it as a generic, but this is ugly on a few different levels.