14.20.4 Other Changes

• Windows XP is no longer supported since it has reached its end of life (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/endofsupport.aspx)
• Solaris 8 and 9 are no longer supported. Solaris 10 is still supported on both SPARC and x86/x86_64 platforms.
• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard are no longer supported. Mac OS X 10.7 and later are supported (64-bit only).
• The Emacs mode will not actively be maintained for XEmacs. GNU Emacs is still fully supported and we will consider fixing reported XEmacs problems. Users are encouraged to migrate to SPIDER (see SICStus Prolog IDE in the SICStus Prolog Manual).
• The Prolog flags single_var_warnings and discontiguous_warnings are now volatile with default value off in runtime systems. This means that, as before, in runtime systems, these warnings are off by default, but now they can be switched on.
• absolute_file_name/[2,3] no longer treats the file name user in a special way, by default. The new option if_user/1 is available if the old behavior is needed.
• absolute_file_name/[2,3] now applies the same kind of case-normalization to the extensions/1 and glob/1 arguments as to the file name. This affects Windows, where extensions(['.pl']) now will have the same effect as extensions(['.PL']). Prior to release 4.3 the extensions/1 and glob/1 options were case sensitive on all platforms.
• On Windows, open/[3,4], and other built-in predicates that creates files and directories, no longer applies case-normalization on the file name before creating a file. This means that open/[3,4] creates files using the same character case as specified in the file argument. The stream property file_name/1 is not affected, i.e. it still shows a case-normalized name. This change is mostly invisible from Prolog but it means that creating a file with open('HelloWorld.txt', write, S) will now create file named ‘HelloWorld.txt’ whereas earlier releases would create a file ‘helloworld.txt’.
• library(types): Goal and Arity arguments are now checked.
• Jasper: Java 6, e.g. JDK 1.6, or later is required for all Java code.
• Jasper: On OS X, the file suffix for the SICStus Java Native Library has changed from ‘.jnilib’ to ‘.dylib’, for compatibility with Java 8.
• library(lists): is_list/1 and proper_length/2 now fail for cyclic lists. They used to not terminate.
• CLPFD:
  • - Some options of table/3 and case/4 have gone obsolete.
  • - Machine capacities of cumulatives/3 do not need to be fixed.
• ZINC: The Flatzinc parser is significantly faster, and solving is often faster too. Several search options now have support in C.
• The unsupported library(tkconsole) and tcltk:tk_terminal/5 has been ported from SICStus 3 to SICStus 4.