A First Glimpse of the MetaTrader 5 Client Terminal

With the benefit of an apparently hasty translation from the Russian original the MQL4 community website has just published an English language review by one of the MT5 closed beta testers that includes some pictures of the beta version of the MetaTrader 5 client terminal in action.

Apart from the pretty pictures (literally!) the author, Yuriy Zaytsev, explains some of the new features that will be available to expert advisor programmers.

Experienced programmers get more possibilities. For those who liked MQL4 and don't know about OOP developers left the possibility to write in MQL5 using the style of MQL4 without OOP. The difference is in the functionality that should be learned again.

I take this to mean that even though expert advisor writers won't be forced to learn object oriented programming, they will still have to rewrite portions of their MQL4 code in order to get their "robots" working with MetaTrader 5. Yuriy gives a simple example:

The Ask and Bid variables do not exist anymore. In order to get the Bid values the below function should be called: SymbolInfoDouble(Symbol(),SYMBOL_BID);

Yuriy then goes on to mention some new features that look as though they will fix some of the shortcomings of MQL4 by allowing EAs to be driven by other events apart from the arrival of a new tick. At long last at some point in "Fall 2009" it will finally be possible for expert advisor writers to use the shiny new OnTimer() and OnTrade() functions.

Personally I can't wait to get started!