Getting Started Using NCL, 1999

The NCAR Command Language (NCL) was first released in Version 4 of the package in 1996. NCL is an interpreted language and was designed as a cleaner more uniform interface to the underlying graphics functions. The were initial concerns about the ease of use of the interface and, to address this, Mary Haley wrote an extensive suite of interface functions that were documented in the manual in this folder. These functions, and this interface, have come to be known as GSUN and have become the primary interface to the package as of 2010. The manual in this folder is dated February, 1999. With the advent of online documentation, having a hardcopy of this manual is of historical interest. The GSUN functions in NCL are now (2011) the gsn_xxxx functions.