 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 codice_1 or codice_2) 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.