THE NEW METAL RELEASE

METAL IS A VERY EASY TO USE AND EASY TO LEARN BASIC LANGUAGE WITH A USER FRIENDLY INTERFACE.METAL IS Faster than any interpreter. A PC preliminary version of METAL beats BASIC that used to come with MS-DOS by 1012% (Sieve benchmark). It beats Future Basic (supposedly a compiler) by 675%, and Chipmunk BASIC (a very fast interpreter) by 27%. These tests were done with the first version of METAL. This version is somewhat faster. As for the compilers, MS QuickBasic compiler for MS-DOS beat preliminary unoptimized PC-version of METAL by cca. 250%, proving that METAL provides an affordable sacrifice of performance to portability.

METAL features dynamic allocation, garbage collection and a flexible memory heap.

METAL includes a rich command library, that includes powerful graphics, sound, speech, math and file I/O routines.

2900 lines of hypertextual documentation are accessible at any time from the "Help" menu.

When METAL 1.3 came out it was VERY much improved in stability and language. Now METAL 1.6+ is out and I can't say I'm disappointed but it still has some things to be added to it

THIS HAS BEEN IMPLEMENTED OR FIXED(OF THE THINGS EARLIER MENTIONED HERE):

• The inkey$ function needs some improvement, on my keyboard it only reads the right side of the keyboard.
• Quicktime support (MIDI, MooV).
• Getting the length of soundtracks.
• Support for different picture formats (JPEG,GIF).

THIS REALLY SHOULD BE ADDED TO THE METAL EDITOR AND DEBUGGER:

• The usual text drag and drop interface found in almost all applications which handles text
• Syntax make beautifull (add spacing and capitals for keywords)
• Keyword detection, suggestion and autofilling (like REALbasic).
• Better help, if you press "help" and there is a highlited keyword in the Code help for the keyword should show up.
• When something goes wrong during code execution it is often hard to find the bug since the error string only indicates an error not what and where the error is (line number, variable).
• Perhaps an event lister which lists all of the events executed during the code execution.
• Multiple undos and redos

STILL NOT IMPLEMENTED:

• ACCESS TO THE TOOLBOX !!!!!! : Most of the missing functions in METAL could be coded with this
• SERIAL CONTROL !!!!!! (socket and device)
• Menu items.
• Multiple, movable windows.
• Buttons, Listboxes ...
• Getting the number of bytes a certain file consist of.
• Perhaps some drag and drop support.
• A simpler direct key reader (if a specific key is pressed or not) instead of using peek
• 3D- rendering (Open GL)

A list of common basic commands that are not supported in METAL:

• MouseSpeed(X,Y)
• MouseArea(Minx,Miny,Maxx,Maxy) ,limits the mouse moving area to the rectangle passed
• Pointer(cursor reference#), change the mouse cursor picture.
• NthField$(Source,Separator,Fieldnumber), example: field$=NthField$(Axel*Nordin*139931*Male","*",2 :outputs "Nordin"
• Fill(fillstartx,fillstarty,fillcolor,[stopcolor]),fills the color specified by fillcolor until it reaches an diffrent color (additionally you could specific a color to stop at) from fillstartx,fillstarty.
• Better file read and write (choose a specific line number to read from, ReadAll)
• Types
• Change the screen width and screen height
• Change the number of colors the screen displays
• UCASE$(string) , LCASE$(string)

Bugs?:

• When loading and playing a sound from a resource file I have not been able to play any other sound from the resources later in the code.
• Timer is not the number of seconds elapsed since January 1:st 1970 it is the number of seconds elapsed since the computer was turned on (like ticks but in seconds)

Tips and tricks:

• I just want to make everyone aware of the feature of being able to use any text font installed on your computer just by using textfont "the font name". I don't think this was featured in the previous METAL versions
• Timer is not the number of seconds elapsed since January 1:st 1970 it is the number of seconds elapsed since the computer was turned on (like ticks but in seconds)
• The sprite collision detection works pixel by pixel
• All file, sprite, screen references are simply numbers which means you can use them just as usual variables (dim)
• The Sprite collision detection detects all of the sprites on a position (Not only the top sprite)

This will probably never be added:

Compiled apps instead of intepreted.

Got something more you want to see in METAL? email me