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 statically typed A dialect of APL. His colleagues extended A into A+ in 1988. Finally, Whitney presented the first K implementation in 1992, a "reduced instruction set" dialect which only used ASCII glyphs and limited arrays to (nested) vectors. 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.