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INTRODUCTION

          PROPOSAL FOR A STANDARD SET OF PRIMITIVES
                   FOR MACHINE-INDEPENDENT
            CHARACTER MANIPULATION IN FORTRAN 77

                              by

                      Nelson H.F. Beebe
             Departments of Physics and Chemistry
                      University of Utah
                   Salt Lake City, UT 84112

                     Tel: (801) 581-5254



                         INTRODUCTION
                         ============

 At the 1979 NRCC Conference on Software Standards in Chemistry held  at
 the University of  Utah, the  author proposed  that a  standard set  of
 primitives for character manipulation  in chemical software written  in
 the FORTRAN language be adopted, and set forth a selection of  routines
 which were felt to serve the purpose.

 These routines were  given the  prefix KAR,  and are  described in  the
 proceedings of  that  conference,  as well  as  in  a  machine-readable
 document similar  to this  one.   They use  FORTRAN 66  Hollerith  data
 stored in INTEGER variables, and routines were provided for packing and
 unpacking characters into Aw and  A1 formats.  An extensive  collection
 of software  which  uses these  has  been widely  distributed,  and  is
 operational on almost every major machine type in the world.

 It would be  desirable if these  primitives could continue  to be  used
 with all FORTRAN  77 compilers,  but alas,  a few  such compilers  have
 dropped support of Hollerith data, so  that it has become necessary  to
 devise a similar  set of  primitives which use  exclusively FORTRAN  77
 CHARACTER data.