J (programming language)

The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Kenneth E. Iverson and Roger Hui, is an array programming language based primarily on APL (also by Iverson). To avoid repeating the APL special-character problem, J uses only the basic ASCII character set, resorting to the use of the dot and colon as inflections to form short words similar to digraphs. Most such primary (or primitive) J words serve as mathematical symbols, with the dot or colon extending the meaning of the basic characters available. Also, many characters which in other languages often must be paired (such as [] {} "" `` or ) are treated by J as stand-alone words or, when inflected, as single-character roots of multi-character words. J is a very terse array programming language, and is most suited to mathematical and statistical programming, especially when performing operations on matrices. It has also been used in extreme programming and network performance analysis. Like John Backus's languages FP and FL, J supports function-level programming via its tacit programming features. Unlike most languages that support object-oriented programming, J's flexible hierarchical namespace scheme (where every name exists in a specific locale) can be effectively used as a framework for both class-based and prototype-based object-oriented programming. Since March 2011, J is free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3). One may also purchase source under a negotiated license. J permits point-free style and function composition. Thus, its programs can be very terse and are considered difficult to read by some programmers. The "Hello, World!" program in J is: 'Hello, World!' This implementation of hello world reflects the traditional use of J – programs are entered into a J interpreter session, and the results of expressions are displayed. It's also possible to arrange for J scripts to be executed as standalone programs.