IMSL Fortran Numerical Library routines have required arguments and may have optional arguments. All arguments are documented for each routine. For example, consider the routine GCIN which evaluates the inverse of a general continuous CDF. The required arguments are P, X, and F. The optional arguments are IOPT and M. Both IOPT and M take on default values so are not required as input by the user unless the user wishes for these arguments to take on some value other than the default. Often there are other output arguments that are listed as optional because although they may contain information that is closely connected with the computation they are not as compelling as the primary problem. In our example code, GCIN, if the user wishes to input the optional argument “IOPT” then the use of the keyword “IOPT=” in the argument list to assign an input value to IOPT would be necessary.

For compatibility with previous versions of the IMSL Libraries, the NUMERICAL_LIBRARIES interface module includes backwards compatible positional argument interfaces to all routines which existed in the Fortran 77 version of the Library. Note that it is not necessary to use “use” statements when calling these routines by themselves. Existing programs which called these routines will continue to work in the same manner as before.