K

K denotes a family of programming languages designed by Arthur Whitney and commercialized by Morgan Stanley, Kx Systems, and Shakti. In 1985, while at Morgan Stanly, Whitney created the "reduced instruction set", statically typed A dialect of APL. His colleagues extended A into A+ in 1988. Finally, Whitney presented the first K implementation in 1992, which only used ASCII glyphs. For a long time, K's main role was as implementation language for Q, the query language of kdb+, which is an in-memory, column-based database. K7 ("Shakti K") is the first K to have full Unicode support, and it also uses a limited set non-ASCII symbols in the core language, for example  and.