DYNA25: Spring Edition is taking place on 7 April in New York City. More info

Richard Smith

Development Manager

Based: United Kingdom

Joined Dyalog Ltd: June 2008

Richard - Dyalog Team Member

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.

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 This superseded an earlier experimental I-beam (819⌶) that could map to lower or upper case but not fold – this I-beam is currently deprecated and will be removed in Dyalog v20.0. … Read
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 – for example: something which could be experimental, which might provide access to parts of the interpreter that should only be accessed with care, or may set … Read
I was asked by a colleague why ⎕S reports two matches in the following example: ('\d*'⎕S 0 1)'321' ┌───┬───┐ │0 3│3 0│ └───┴───┘ Here we are asking for the position and length of sequences of zero or more digits in an input document containing three numeric characters. Intuitively there is just one match of all … Read
⎕JSON Table Support

⎕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

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Is it Christmas Yet?

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

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Cross-Platform Configuration Files

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

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⎕NMOVE and Other Predictions for Dyalog Version 17.0

⎕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

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Something Old, Something New, Something Experimental

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

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Cross-platform File Functions

Cross-platform File Functions

Popular modern programming languages benefit from access to good quality, community-built, code libraries. However, there has been no great tradition of this in the APL community; this is something that Dyalog wishes to address. The interpreter can ...View

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Team Dyalog

We promote a culture where innovation, fun, pride, and acceptance is part of our everyday life. We come from a variety of backgrounds, and we learn from each other’s diversity.

Silas - Dyalog Team Member
Silas
Core Developer
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Jason - Dyalog Team Member
Jason
IT Manager
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Michael - Dyalog Team Member
Michael
APL Developer
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Andy - Dyalog Team Member
Andy
Operations Manager
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…or perhaps even join the team!

Get Support

Technical advice and assistance on all aspects of Dyalog usage is available by e-mail (support@dyalog.com) and/or telephone (+44 1256 830030 – limited to U.K. office hours). Limited advice on design and coding is available, but is not intended to replace the use of the printed and on-line documentation. Except when reporting an issue with the software, users are encouraged to seek advice from the user community via the Dyalog Forum (reading the content of the forums does not require membership).

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