Rev. January 2017

For over 30 years, our main goal has been to enhance our product (using new concepts and technologies) while ensuring the compatibility of 4D applications. As early adopters of 4D know, we have always put a lot of effort into compatibility, and we can find 4D applications all over the world that were created years and years ago, with old versions of 4D and of an OS, that are still working with the latest revisions of the product.

Unfortunately, it sometimes becomes too difficult to mix old technologies with new:

• 4D must bring new technologies, new APIs, and new paradigms to developers.
• OSes change every day, and sometimes deprecate their own old APIs

This is why 4D sometimes needs to tag some commands and features as deprecated, meaning that one day, they will be removed from the language in a future major version.

Letting developers know what is deprecated and what kind of replacement can be used instead makes it much more comfortable for them to implement the change in their code: There is no urgency, no pressure, and the developer has plenty of time to make any necessary changes.

We start by covering all the functions that are currently deprecated or that have been removed in the current 4D release, followed by a list of deprecated commands along with their current status. We also provide a quick summary table.
You can also access the equivalent documents generated for previous major versions of 4D.