Primitives

K's primitives are designed to fit a large range of diverse functionality within the ASCII character set. This makes it typable on a keyboard, while keeping the language expressive and interesting to use.

All of K's primitives are made to be multipurpose, and have varied meanings based on the context they are used in. Symbol primitives can be either 1 or 2 characters long.

Verbs

Operator Verbs

Operator verbs use the following characters: : + - * % ! & | < > = ~ , ^ # _ $ ? @ ..

Suffixing a verb with : forces it to be interpreted as monadic.

Monadic forms (one argument) are listed first, dyadic forms (two arguments) are listed second.

Empty cells indicate that the primitives in the given dialect are the same as in K4-K6.

Table of operator verbs in major dialects

	K3		K4,K5,K6		K9*
	monad	dyad	monad	dyad	monad	dyad
:			identity	right
+			transpose	add	transpose	add
-			negate	subtract	negate	subtract
*			first	multiply	first	multiply
%	reciprocal		square root	divide		divide
!		rotate, mod	enum, odometer, keys	mod, create dict	enum (odometer), keys	create dict
&			where	min	where	min
|			reverse	max	reverse	max
<			grade up	lesser	ascending	lesser
>			grade down	greater	descending	greater
=			group, identity matrix	equal	group	equal
~			not	match	not	match
,			enlist	concatenate	enlist	concatenate
^	shape	power	null?	except, fill	sort	cut
#			length	take, reshape	count	filter, take
_			floor, lowercase	drop, delete, cut	floor	filter-out, drop
$			string	pad, cast	string	parse
?			distinct, random-float	find, random	unique	find, random
@	atom?		type	at	type	cast
.			eval, values	dot	eval	dot

Special Forms

Table of special forms

	Polyadic Name
@	amend
.	deep amend, try
$	if
!	update (K4/qdb)
?	splice
?	select (K4/qdb)

Named Verbs

Table of named verbs in various implementations

	oK	K7	K9*
utility	in prm	in within bin like find freq prm cmb	in bin within prm freq cmb
math	sin cos exp log	sqrt sin cos abs log exp rand	sin cos log div exp sqr sqrt dot bar deltas sum sums rand
stats		count first last min max sum avg var dev med	count first last avg med mode var mavg msum
table(K7+)		asc dsc key	top key unkey meta
misc		min max asc	min max countd

Adverbs

Adverbs use the characters ', / and \ for their syntax.

They are primitives that take general verbs as arguments. As such they are higher order functions.

Remarks

^*: K9 is a nascent dialect which is still currently undergoing changes. Some pages may not be up to date with the latest build, and some are intentionally left unwritten in case of later changes.

^**: The primitives base encode, base decode, binary search, join and split are verbs in the adverb syntax space. They are distinguished by argument type.