Basic concepts

The design motifs for GCL come from two principal families of programming languages. The first is traditional imperative programming languages such as Pascal, C, and Modula-3. In particular, the GCL's concept of types draws heavily from these languages, although the number of predefined types in GCL is much larger due to the specialized nature of the language. The second is more specialized programming languages such as Mathematica, from which the GCL's grammar is partially drawn. Users with experience using any of these languages should find the GCL easy to learn; however, no programming experience is necessary to begin using the language effectively.

The GCL is a language designed primarily for building, solving and doing econometric analysis of non-cooperative games. Because the GCL is a specialized language, it has several features that are designed to make computing as easy and flexible as possible in this kind of environment. Some of the main features of the GCL are: