13.12.1 New Features

• SPIDER, the SICStus Prolog IDE, is a new Eclipse-based development environment for SICStus with many powerful features. See SICStus Prolog IDE for more information.
• Do-loops, a new control structure and built-in predicate do/2 for performing simple iterations. See Do-Loops.
• Conditional compilation, a pre-processing step that selectively discards parts of a file at compile time. This is especially useful for writing code that needs to be compatible with more than one Prolog implementation. See Conditional Compilation for more information.
• New Prolog flags:

  dialect

  version_data

  make it easier to determine which version of SICStus is running. Especially useful with conditional compilation.
  

  platform_data

  os_data

  make it easier to determine on which operating system SICStus is running.
  

  min_tagged_integer

  max_tagged_integer

  The range of small integers.
  

  argv

  Not a new flag but is no longer read-only. Setting it can be useful, e.g. in test cases.

• Added stream property interactive for interactive streams, like the standard input and output streams when invoking SICStus on a terminal or with the -i command line option.
• Meta-predicate declarations now allow an integer instead of : (colon) in order to help analysis tools follow code references. All documentation and libraries have been updated to reflect this. (This was always allowed in SICStus as a substitute for : (colon) but was never documented).
• Compound terms denoting references to dynamic clauses are recognized by the new built-in predicate db_reference/1.
• The previously reserved argument to SP_initialize() can now be used to pass initialization options.
• Saved-states and ‘.po’ files are portable across architectures that have the same word size. Pre-4.1 ‘.sav’ and ‘.po’ files are not compatible with this and future releases.
• Several new statistics keywords are available. Also, statistics/0 now resets the “time spent since the latest call” counters.
• library(odbc) is a new ODBC library for interfacing with databases. ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is a standard API for using a DBMS (DataBase Management System). By using ODBC you can access data from a multitude of DBMSs without having to know the details of each DBMS.
• It is now possible to pass environment variables to the sub-process using the new environment/1 option to process:process_create/3.
• random:setrand/1 can now be passed an arbitrary integer for initializing the state of the random number generators. This is easier than constructing a valid random state like those returned by getrand/1.
• library(clpfd):
  • geost/[2,3,4] is a new powerful constraint that constrains the location in space of non-overlapping multi-dimensional objects.
  • table/[2,3] is more scalable and has several new options for controlling its DAG construction.
  • automaton/3 is a shorthand for the most common use of automaton/8, and automaton/9 extends automaton/8 with options.
  • Unary minus (-) is allowed in arithmetic expressions.
  • Several new demo examples.
• library(zinc): upgraded to FlatZinc version 1.0.
• library(system): a new predicate, environ/3, for reading system properties, environment variables or a merged view of both. See below for the new concept “System Properties” that has replaced most uses of environment variables.
• library(sockets): The predicates that create socket streams now take options encoding/1 and eol/1 with the same meaning as for open/4.