VMS Help FORTRAN, Data, Substrings  *Conan The Librarian (sorry for the slow response - running on an old VAX)

  A character substring is a contiguous segment of a character
  variable, character array element, or character field reference.
  It has one of the following forms:

     v([e1]:[e2])  OR  a(s[,s]...)([e1]:[e2])

  v   Is a character variable name.

  a   Is a character array name.

  s   Is a subscript expression.

  e1  Is a numeric expression specifying the leftmost
      character position of the substring.

  e2  Is a numeric expression specifying the rightmost
      character position of the substring.

  NOTE:
    1 .LE. e1 .LE. e2 .LE. length-of-v must hold true