Defines facilities for use in Fortran for the manipulation of character strings of dynamically variable length. Also provides an auxiliary standard for the version of the Fortran language informally known as Fortran 90. Prescribes the name of a Fortran module, the name of a derived data type to be used to represent varying-length strings, the interfaces for the procedures and operators to be provided to manipulate objects of this type, and the semantics that are required for each of the entities made accessible by this module.