Summary of WCX-related features in the libraries

Some libraries are affected by the introduction of wide characters.

When using library(jasper) SICStus Prolog properly receives non-ASCII strings from Java, and similarly, non-ASCII strings can be correctly passed to Java. This is in contrast with versions of SICStus Prolog earlier then 3.8 (i.e. without the WCX extensions), where, for example, strings containing non-ASCII characters passed from Java to Prolog resulted in an UTF-8 encoded atom or character code list on the Prolog side.

Several predicates in libraries sockets, system and tcltk create streams. These now use the SP_make_stream_context() function, with SP_WCX_FLAG as the option and the relevant SP_STREAMHOOK_LIB constant as the context argument. For example, if the WCX mode is set using environment variables (see WCX Environment Variables), then this implies that the selected encoding will be used for streams created in the libraries. E.g. if the SP_CTYPE environment variable is set to utf8, then the output of non-ASCII characters to a socket stream will be done using UTF-8 encoding. If a wcx_open hook is supplied, then the user is free to select a different encoding for the libraries, as he is informed about the stream being opened by a library through the context argument of the wcx_open function.

Some of the arguments of library predicates contain atoms which are file names, environment variable names, commands, etc. If these contain non-ASCII characters, then they will be passed to the appropriate operating system function following a conversion to the system encoding in force (wcx_to_os hook), and similarly such atoms coming from the OS functions undergo a conversion from system encoding (wcx_from_os). Note however that host names (e.g. in system:host_name(S)) are assumed to be consisting of ASCII characters only.