PARENT : CoSy/Language
ArthurWhitney `s language : K
Developed thru years at Morgan Stanley and Union Bank of Switzerland in New York , It is finally available on the web .

• Extracting the Chapter headings from the downloaded text of " The Count of Monte Cristo "
• K User Group Meeting notes : ( See also : objdev.org )
  • KUG:Kdb990527 Kdb
  • KUG:990225 : Two talks on K :
    1) Experiences of a VB / Excel User Learning K;
    2) Genetic Programming | Optimizing Fitness Fns over spaces of Tokens
  • Kx-FinEng TUE.DEC,981208

• http://www.kx.com/ ArthurWhitney `s language : K , which I consider to be the most conceptually advanced language in its abstraction of the essential structures of data and algorithms . The size of his fully working demo executable is just 128KB .
  His syntax , tho , has a number of idiosyncracies and , most egregiously does not allow creation of infix functions . Instead multiple arguments must be listed in ' [ ; ; ; ] ' list notation .
  Thus | ( A f B ) g C h D | becomes | g [ f [ A ; B ] ; h [ C ; D ] ] | .
  Sorry , I don`t accept this step backward .

  
  Further on this subject :

   Subject: Re: Bob Armstrong's observations on syntax
      Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 14:25:01 -0400
      From: bob@cosy.com (Bob Armstrong)
        To: k@listbox.com
  
  Stevan Apter wrote:
  > Bob Armstrong (http://www.cosy.com/language/index.htm) says:
  >> ArthurWhitney `s language : K , the most conceptually advanced language in
  >> its abstraction of the essential structures of data and algorithms ,
  >> syntax , tho , has a number of idiosyncracies and , most egregiously does
  >> not allow creation of infix functions .
  >>   Instead multiple arguments must be listed in ' [ ; ; ; ] ' list
  >>    notation .
  >>   Thus | ( A f B ) g C h D | becomes | g [ f [ A ; B ] ; h [ C ; D ] ] | .
  >>   Sorry , I don`t accept this step backward .
  >
  > Bracket-notation is syntactic sugar.
  > Transitive verbs can be written infix, but functions are nouns.
   Huh ? Your common words have uncommon meanings if  functions  are not verbs .
  
  > Note:  function application and list indexing:
  >         a[b;...;c]
  > is just '.' on a certain form of list:
  >         .(a;(b;...;c))          / x . y, count y = valence x
  > Other forms:
  >         .(v;i)                  / access
  >         .(v;i;u1)               / amend with monadic
  >         .(v;i;u2;d)             / amend with dyadic
   Thus my example can be written as .( g ; .( f ; A ; B ) ; .( h ; C ; D ) )  ?
   That an improvement ?
   -- BobArmstrong --  http://CoSy.com
       The NoteComputer  for  WorldWide BusinessPersons
        " The Antidote for Dishonesty is Disclosure "
    See  http://www.cosy.com/trnsprt/seizure.htm   NYC Police Seized
     MotorBoard  

• Impeachment Vote Analysis using K Language . Extracting 6 Honorable House Democrats from CSPAN Vote records .

• K rules :

    Subject: bell-labs benchmark        Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 10:06:45 -0700
      From: "arthur whitney"                   To: 
  

  Re: Timing Trials, or, the Trials of Timing: Experiments with Scripting and User-Interface Languages
  Brian W. Kernighan & Christopher J. Van Wyk

  See : kx.com/a/kl/examples/bell.k ( Copied to : Language/K/BellExamples )

   k is faster (sum of times)
    k(32) perl(95) java(300) tcl(1400+)
  
   k is shorter (lines of code)
    k(9) awk(66) perl(96) tcl(105) scheme(170) vb(200) java(350)
  
   we really are different ...
   the benchmark is loops, text-processing and stdio.
            we do vectors, data-processing and mmap. 

• Older view : \COSY\COSY!/Job/ArthurWhitney`s:K An e-mail I picked up from comp.lang.apl archives .
  ( 960722 | Incedentally , I stayed in NYC THU.JUN,960620 to see Arthur give a demo of K at UBS . In a demonstration of disorganization unconscionable for a bank with global pretensions , the projector for the Sun hi-res monitor could not be found . Perhaps 2 out of the much - beyond - the - ordinary SigAPL crowd could see any of Arthur`s actual conversation with his machine . It makes it not worth my uploading my notes .
  To understand the value of this region of ComputerLinguistic space , note that UBS is the only user of ( and , in fact , thru `97 06 , has proprietary control of ) " K " . Apparently 4 individuals , most or all ex- MorganStanley , support K full time .
  Conclusion : UBS spends around %2 M $ on the language each year . )
  980105| Update : CoSy/Language/K License : $100k.
• See also cosy.com/views/APL94.txt for a glimpse at Arthur`s presentation there .

 
  ============================: MON.JAN,980105 :============================
    From: glasss@mindspring.com (Seymour Glass)              97/12/23 21:18
 Subject: Re: What is K? Any References?

  whitaker@tiac.net (Orion Whitaker) wrote:
>Sorry to be clueless but... What is K?
>All I learned is that a search for a single letter topic is non-trivial.
>Do you have any pointers to the literature?
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
>Orion C. Whitaker, III, M.D.            Anesthesia & Pain Management
>whitaker@tiac.net                                      Massachusetts

Pain management is your line, eh? Try this, which I got from the K people:
Maintenance is provided for an annual fee of 20% of the K
Developer License Fee.
K Developer License Fee - $100,000 per developer.
Henry Rich
  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -
    From: Mike Kent               97/12/24 00:20
 Subject: Re: What is K? Any References?
 Seymour Glass wrote:
> whitaker@tiac.net (Orion Whitaker) wrote:
...
> >Orion C. Whitaker, III, M.D.            Anesthesia & Pain Management
> >whitaker@tiac.net                                      Massachusetts
>
> Pain management is your line, eh?  Try this, which I got from the K
> people:
 I don't think they're targeting the SOHO/independent-consultant
 market.  OTOH, I think this may represet a price reduction ...
 #Linux000202 
  ============================: WED.FEB,000202 :============================
17:45-19|  ArthurWhitney  BoF @ LinuxWorld : K & Web-based time series
 analysis on massive amounts of data in real time . 
|17:50| Natural migration from UNIX in `80s - NT just detour .
 Fin : Price Data analysis
 Telecom : Call data records , packets .   ClickStream for CRM
 Billions of rows . Lehman has  35M rows .
 Time series capability  not practical in     SQL .
 Price/Performance problem w Linux SMP . - scalability .
 Remote administration hell of a lot easier .

 Zurich : " NT very stable as long as just using Kx products . "
 Linus hardware Choice > NT .   Intel only now catching up to RS6000 systems
  @ MorganStanley in `80s & early `90s .
  Windows 2000 same speed as  NT .
 Is Linux going to keep up w Drivers , etc .
 Linux supports more disk drives - file formats . NT other devices .
 Paging : VM ?
 64bit ?  lin Nt Unix :  2 3 1 |
 Use of Op Sys file sys  + for  K over many other  DBs .
 TCP/IP  : message overhead : Overhead : 4000  2000   msg%s on 50MHz machine
 Thru put : 40MB % sec vs 9MB  for NT winsock .
 File size    2GB   1.5GB  Unix  2.7- 3.5  |( no issue w 64b )|
 Do own sorting : 3-4M floats % sec .
 Context switching - process capacity :  RedHat  Linux  10x switch speed .
 Why corps stick w MS ? | SGI guy : HP sold NT , when that failed , switched
 cust to own Unix .
 Linux has ISP , university mkt segments .
 Not as scalable as Sun or RS6000 .
 JoD w drive MS to separate P&Ls -  Software $$ will be separate charge
 from Hardware .
 MS Linux coming ?  Seen job offers .  | ODBC advanage to  MS . v JDBC
AW : Excel been complex but great interface .
 MS SOAP interface .
 Lehman DB :  40k secuities , 1000 days  , 200 attributes  |( bonds )|
  10M Time series  . 40M RDB rows .   |( on 248MHz Sun 2 processor )|
 40GB DB w 2GB RAM  .  Sorted by date .  Hi hits on 5 of 200 columns .
 get fantastic data locality .  300MB columns .
 Day end updates :
 Oracle has you sign agree not to publish  Benchmarks .
 OpenLink w have Open Benchmark software in couple of mo .
 1E6 updates % sec .
 Comparison of 340k positions over yr 400 cols  . SyBaseIQ .
 Beat  Oracle  50 to 1  storing  raw data .  very fast updates .
 Very hi cache hit rate  .   Ultra2 SCSI 70MB % sec .
 100MB % sec .
Telecom ? a# B# switch Billing traffic class .
 many many milions of calls @ speed of switch . ( bashful customer )
 several M xactions % day .  Linux on multiple machines next to Switch .
 Mem : buy 4-5x bigest col .
 Never swap -  sequential writes to disk .
 Going parallel in  K the lang .  |19:0| 
 I demoed to several people the ability to execute K in CoSy
 I`ve recently implemented . 
  ============================: THU.FEB,010201 :============================
|14:41| AW : Relational DB : KDB :   Billion trades
 1.5B quotes from major exchanges .
 fnd `93 . | Millennium Partners .
 10M trades & quotes % day .
 Telstra : Capacity Monitoring - international phone calls .
 5 hrs to design load scripts . T1 would take 3Wks . to take disks frm Mid
 town up to Boston .
 Ford toras  3hrs : 50mB % sec .
 partitioned by date sorted by symbol -
 Fast because Inverted . accident of history which called inverted .
     select max price from t    |>| 65000 | BirkshireHathaway
     few million
     select where symbol = 'IBM  | fast since data sorted by symbol .
  added language :
$select from t a , t b , t c   |
  select count from t where 0 < deltas price
 249E6  / upticks
 OLTP 1 M xacts % sec % cpu w loging
 OLAP several m records % cpu % sec
 Reuters
 SCSI 30-40MB % sec fast enough .
 DollarVolume : Price * Shares
  half of time price stays same .
Aud : where results ? now , all results come bach to master .
 fast because of col storage , why fast on updates don`t
 understan .
 DBA can set up so joins precalculates .
 SmallTable / anything less than 1GB - fits in memory .
 Don`t denormalize .
 KDB 40KB K code , K is 130KB .
  accumu xacts for second & bulk update to overcome 250 % OpSys speed .
 KDB single threaded
 |15:29| Did 2B item DB in 1980 .  sorting main weapon for spead .
 K constant time appends w exponential allocation .