Metal Basic

Back in the days

It appears "Metal Basic" has been abandoned. My path had lead me to create a few programs, back in 2002 and 2003 ; when Apple was transitioning most of his users from OS 9 to the shiny OS X.

What was great about Metal Basic ? it is very light (less than 10MB when uncompressed and with all the documentation and source code examples) and worked on both environments : OS X native (no need to have OS 9 installed) requiring less than 64MB of RAM - and you could create some standalone program.

Meanwhile the closest development language available at the time was codewarrior - so for little tasks and programs ... Metal Basic was free and did the job pretty well!

A nice little Gem

http://www.freymanart.com/Metal/
http://www.idevgames.com/forums/thread-10105.html 

Here is a little source for a file-parser :

backcolor 65535,65535,65535
forecolor 0,0,0

cls
disable done

inp: name$ = open dialog$
if not exists (name$) then ? "bad file name": end

set console title to name$

ffile1 = open file (name$)

n=0

t1=timer

repeat
  line input ffile1, line$
  print line$
   n=n+1
 if (n mod 24)=0 then
      print len(line$);
      input "Press to continue";hit$ : cls
      if hit$="q" then goto endloop
 end if
until eof (ffile1)


endloop:

t2=timer-t1
line$="lines_"+str$(n)+"_in_"+str$(t2)+"_ms"
print line$

flog=open file("trace.log")
fwrite flog, line$

close file flog
close file ffile1

input "Press to quit";hit$

end