Martin Richards is a British computer scientist best known for his development of the BCPL programming language 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.
Richards studied mathematics as an undergraduate student at Cambridge University and took the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science. His PhD was on programming language design and implementation. He was a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory until his retirement in 2007.
In addition to BCPL Richards' work includes the development of the TRIPOS 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'.
Richards is a fellow of St Johns College at the University of Cambridge.