The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Kenneth E. Iverson and Roger Hui, is a synthesis of APL (also by Iverson) and the FP and FL function-level languages created by John Backus.To avoid repeating the APL special-character problem, J requires only the basic ASCII character set, resorting to the use of the dot and colon as "inflections" to form short words similar to digraphs.