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[JsNO BAR---NUNN]

Thanks for the many replies people have sent me. I've got 7 poeple
lined up to recieve MONTANUS this friday (hopefully). What I'd like
to do now is give you a little description of MONTANUS, and what it
does.

Last year, me and Chandramohan Thavakulasingam approached the Northern
Territory Conservation Commission, asking them if they wanted any
software produced for our final year Computing Project. We got informed
of a system in the Herbarium Section called DELTA. So we were instructed
to make a system to replace it.

MONTANUS is a baby clone of the CONFOR & INTKEY functions. It's not as
powerful as INTKEY, and the reason it's not is because we didn't have
time to implement all of the functions INTKEY had (for example BEST).
But what it does do is done very well.

MONTANUS is composed of three subprograms:


  (a) The  MONTANUS Manager: This a basically just a selection menu,
                             it also allows you to select a path to
                             a given DELTA database, and it's also
                             supplies various information about a
                             current database.

  (b) BAC (Born Again Confor): This converts the 1986 DELTA standard
                               to MONTANUS format, in which it can be
                               queried. (Note: it will also convert
                               EXTREME VALUES not current in the
                               1986 standard)

  (c) BAIT (Born Again InTkey): This is the actual quering system.
                                Even though some of the quering
                                functions are a little bit different
                                in principle, but I'll list the
                                equivalent DELTA functions:

                  DELTA FUNCTION                 MONTANUS FUNCTION
                  ------------------------------------------------
                   USES                          SELECT CHARACTER
                   DIAGNOSE                      SELECT ITEM (a lose diagnose)
                   DIAGNOSE                      DIAGNOSE (more strict diagnose)
                   SIMILARITIES                  SIMILARITIES
                   DIFFERENCES                   DIFFERENCES
                   SUMMARY                       CHARACTER SUMMARY
                   MATCH                         SET MATCH
                   INCLUDE / EXCLUDE             INC/EXC CHAR / ITEM



We were going to do more functions, but we ran out of time. Future
versions may posess functions equivalent to BEST. MONTANUS is all
menu driven. You will find it very easy it use.

Over all, I'm pretty impressed with 1.2B, compared to 1.0b & 1.1b.


:Jason Nunn