I have been an avid user of Adrian Smith’s graphics package since the early days when it ran under APL*PLUS/PC and you ran a little DOS program to send the file and its PostScript macros to the PostScript printer. The results (many of them exhibited at previous APL conferences) have never failed to please me. Adrian keeps apace with changes in modern technology without the moans and groans software writers usually issue when faced with yet another re-write. This is because (a) Adrian has a canny knack of writing software as though he could see what is over the computer software/hardware horizon and (b) he is such a productive programmer! As a result the Causeway Rain Graphics package now available exploits every new and exciting feature of modern APL interpreters such as Dyalog APL.

In my experience as a professional statistician, I am constantly surprised by the poor standard of statistical diagrams and also their relative scarcity. I have never yet seen a really good graph come from Excel (not surprising I hear you say?) nor from statistical packages such as SPSS or SAS. Yet it is all here – in Rain. Where would I have been without it (those all important transparencies produced for my lectures usually with only ten minutes to do it in!)? Where would my research students have been without it (witness pages of graphs in their theses)? My pleasant task is to lead you through the basic facilities of Rain and to demonstrate how easy it is to use. As we say in the UK, it really is the best thing since sliced bread!