Richard Smith

Role Summary

Richard is the Development Manager within the Dyalog interpreter development team. In this role he divides his time between working on the interpreter and planning and keeping track of the development projects.

Biography

Richard likes writing interpreters and compilers: at school he wrote extensions to Microsoft BASIC for fun, for his final-year university project he wrote a BBC BASIC interpreter, and for his first twenty years in the Real World he worked on the front-end of a COBOL interpreter and the back-end of a C compiler. Since then he has been a developer and Development Manager for the Dyalog interpreter.

Outside work, Richard likes music (the good stuff, from the 1970s) and theatre, and has been researching his family tree in the hope of finding an interesting villain. So far no villains have been found, but he has discovered that he is partly French.

Case Conversion: Mapping and Folding

Dyalog v18.0 introduced ⎕C, which converts the case of characters in an array by mapping to lower case, mapping to upper case, or folding. This superseded an... Read

May 2024

Richard Smth

I-Beam Mnemonics

I-Beam (⌶) is an operator that takes as its operand a numeric code and derives a function which isn’t really considered to be part of the APL language... Read

June 2016

Richard Smth

Zero-length Regular Expression Matches Considered Harmful

I was asked by a colleague why ⎕S reports two matches in the following example: ('\d*'⎕S 0 1)'321' ┌───┬───┐ │0 3│3 0│... Read

February 2015

Richard Smth

An Introduction to the Workspace

Richard reveals a few of the interpreter's secrets as he explains what's inside a workspace and how it is managed. This could give you an advantage when tuning your applications for size, performance, or both. 00:00 About the workspace 01:35 Workspa...View

October 2023

Dyalog '23

⎕JSON Table Support

The ⎕JSON system function provides efficient conversion between JSON-formatted text and APL arrays (including namespaces). However, APL developers use a variety of data structures to store two-dimensional tables, and these do not fit neatly into th...View

November 2021

Dyalog '21

Cross-Platform Configuration Files

Configuring the interpreter currently requires a mix of registry entries, environment variables and command-line options. We are at the early stages of designing a portable, human-readable and editable text file format that will greatly simplify the ...View

September 2019

Dyalog '19

Is it Christmas Yet?

APL can easily answer that question: 12 25≡2↑1↓⎕TS Sadly it will probably tell you it's not, but how might you calculate how long you have to wait? Richard will take you on a tour of dates and times and along the way will answer that question...View

September 2019

Dyalog '19

⎕NMOVE and Other Predictions for Dyalog Version 17.0

Richard starts with a brief reminder of the portable file functions introduced in Dyalog version 15.0 (and enhanced in Dyalog version 16.0) to allow simple and portable access to the host file system. He then demonstrates a number of enhancements pro...View

September 2017

Dyalog '17

Something Old, Something New, Something Experimental

In the first Dyalog webinar, - 01:00 Something "old": He demonstrates creating and deleting files and directories using the many associated ⎕ quad functions: ⎕NCREATE, ⎕NERASE, ⎕NAPPEND, ⎕NREPLACE, ⎕NREAD, ⎕NTIE, ⎕NUNTIE, ⎕NDELETE, ...View