4.6 Windows Limitations

• File paths with both `/' and `\' as separator are accepted. SICStus returns paths using `/'. Note that `\', since it is escape character, must be given as `\\' unless the Prolog flag character_escapes is set to off.
• All file names and paths are converted to lowercase when expanded by absolute_file_name/3.
• Interruption by C-c only works in certain circumstances
  • C-c always works while Prolog code is executing. This is true for both sicstus and spwin.
  • C-c always works while spwin is in a blocking read from the GUI window.
  • C-c will interrupt a blocking read from the (default) standard input if sicstus is attached to a console window. That is, if it is started from a command prompt window.
  • C-c will not interrupt a blocking read from a pipe or other non-terminal. In particular, it will not interrupt a blocking read in SICStus if SICStus gets its input from a pipe, such as when running SICStus within Emacs.
  • Blocking system calls, such as those used by library(sockets), are not interruptible by C-c in any kind of SICStus executable.
• In the windowed executable, the user_error stream is line buffered.
• Emacs Issues: Running under Emacs has been tried with recent versions of GNU Emacs and XEmacs. See The Emacs Interface.
  • In both GNU Emacs and XEmacs C-c C-c (comint-interrupt-subprocess) will not interrupt a blocking read from standard input. The interrupt will be noted as soon as some character is sent to SICStus. The characters typed will not be discarded but will instead be used as debugger commands, sometimes leading to undesirable results.
  • Choosing `Send EOF' from the menu, i.e. comint-send-eof), closes the connection to the SICStus process. This will cause SICStus to exit. This problem cannot be fixed in SICStus; it is a limitation of current versions of FSF Emacs and XEmacs (at least up to FSF Emacs 20.7 and XEmacs 21.5).

    Instead of sending and end of file, you can enter the symbol end_of_file followed by a period. Alternatively, a C-z can be generated by typing C-q C-z.

• As of SICStus 3.10, under Windows NT/2000/XP, statistics(runtime, ...) measures user time of the thread running SICStus (the main thread) instead of process user time. This makes statistics(runtime, ...) meaningful also in a multi-threaded program. For a single-threaded program this is the same as process user time.
• Tcl/Tk: The top_level_events option to tk_new/2 is not supported.
• library(timeout) is supported. As of SICStus 3.10, the time is user time of the main thread under Windows NT/2000/XP.
• library(sockets): The AF_UNIX address family is (unsurprisingly) not supported; socket_select/[5,6] support only socket streams for arg 4(5).
• library(system): popen/3 is not supported. kill/2 attempts to terminate the requested process irrespectively of the 2nd arg. You should not use it as it bypasses the killed process cleanup routines.
• library(system): shell/[1,2] does not work reliably except for the simples cases of a single command with no embedded spaces or quote characters. This is because of limitations of agument passing in Windows. A possible workaround is to create a temporary file and invoke that instead.