What is Nasal

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FlightGear offers a very powerful functional scripting language called Nasal[1], which supports reading and writing of internal FlightGear properties, accessing internal data via extension functions, creating GUI dialogs and much more. While "Nasal" may seem like a weird name, just read it as "FlightGear scripting".

Not another scripting language

Nasal uses some of the concepts of ECMA/JavaScript, Python and Perl and implements a simple but complete way of Object Oriented Programming (OOP), Nasal uses an internal garbage collector so that no manual memory management is required by the programmer.

People familiar with other programming languages, and scripting languages like JavaScript in particular, are usually able to learn Nasal rather quickly. FlightGear provides a rich library of simulation-specific and general-purpose functions that can be accessed by Nasal scripts.

Nasal code can be run by aircraft configuration files, and it can be embedded in various XML files (dialog files, animation files, bindings for joysticks, keyboard and cockpit controls, and even in scenery objects). Nasal is platform independent and designed to be thread safe.