14.12.1 New Features

• SPIDER, the SICStus Prolog IDE, is a new Eclipse-based development environment for SICStus with many powerful features. See SICStus Prolog IDE in the SICStus Prolog Manual for more information.
• Do-loops, a new control structure and built-in predicate do/2 for performing simple iterations. See Do-Loops in the SICStus Prolog Manual.
• Conditional compilation, a preprocessing 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 in the SICStus Prolog Manual 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.