Release Notes:

Changes to the IC constraint solver, v5.4 to v5.5

This release of ECLiPSe sees a substantial cleaning-up of the low level primitives for accessing and manipulating IC variables, and writing constraints. The result should be a more regular and coherent interface. The bulk of the changes are to the ic_kernel module, but many of the changes to ic_kernel are also visible when using the lower-level features available in the ic module.

Changes visible at the ic level

Renamed predicates:

Old name	New name
delta/2	get_delta/2
get_ic_bounds/3	get_bounds/3
get_ic_domain_size/2	get_domain_size/2
get_var_type/2	get_solver_type/2
is_ic_var/1	is_solver_var/1
median/2	get_median/2
print_ic/2	print_solver_var/2

Predicates with changed semantics:

get_bounds/3 now returns integer bounds if the variable is integer and the bound(s) finite. (Use get_float_bounds/3 for the old behaviour.)

Removed predicate:

ic_constraints_number/2 (use delayed_goals_number/2 instead).

Renamed suspension conditions:

Old name	New name
wake_lo	min
wake_hi	max
wake_hole	hole
wake_type	type

New predicates (see the predicate documentation for more details):

get_domain/2
get_domain_as_list/2
get_min/2, get_max/2
get_float_bounds/3
get_integer_bounds/3
get_finite_integer_bounds/3
is_solver_type/1
is_in_domain/2,3
delayed_goals_number/2 (newly reexported from ic_kernel)

Changes visible at the ic_kernel level

All of the above plus:

Renamed predicates:

Old name	New name
excl/2	exclude/2^*
excl_range/3	exclude_range/3^*
get_ic_integer_bounds/3	get_integer_bounds/3
ic_delayed_goals_number/2	delayed_goals_number/2
ic_excl/2	ic_exclude/2
ic_excl_range/3	ic_exclude_range/3
ic_lwb/2	ic_impose_min/2
ic_msg/3	msg/3
ic_new_bounds/3	ic_impose_bounds/3
ic_upb/2	ic_impose_max/2
lwb/2	impose_min/2
set_ic_bounds/3	impose_bounds/3
upb/2	impose_max/2

* The exclude/2 and exclude_range/3 will now delay by default if the bounds of the variable are larger than (+-)10000000. This is because of limits on the size of domains which can have holes.