Originally written and developed by Andy Ross for a personal project, it was integrated into FlightGear in November 2003, and has been continuously developed, improved, and refined since then.
Nasal 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".
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.
- @freevryheid for his awesome patterns at Sublime2/Nasal