Martin Richards (born 21 July 1940) is a British computer scientist known for his development of the BCPL programming language[3] which is both part of early research into portable software, and the ancestor of the B programming language invented by Ken Thompson in early versions of Unix and which Dennis Ritchie in turn used as the basis of his widely used C programming language.
[4][5] He was a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory until his retirement in 2007.
In addition to BCPL, Richards' work[6] includes the development of the TRIPOS[7] portable operating system.
He was awarded the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award in 2003 for "pioneering system software portability through the programming language BCPL".
[8] Richards is a fellow of St John's College at the University of Cambridge.