Polynomial systems occur in a wide variety of application domains. Homotopy continuation methods are reliable and powerful methods to compute numerically approximations to all isolated complex solutions. During the last decade considerable progress has been accomplished on exploiting structure in a polynomial system, in particular its sparsity. In this article the structure and design of the software package PHC is described. The main program operates in several modes, is menu driven, and is

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... e oriented. This package features a great variety of root-counting methods among its tools. The outline of one black-box solver is sketched, and a report is given on its performance on a large database of test problems. The software has been developed on four different machine architectures. Its portability is ensured by the gnu-ada compiler.