A simple REPL for Nasal.

Requirements:

• GNU Make
• GCC
• pkg-config
• The readline library & headers

To build, simply run make. This should produce a self-contained binary, nasali.

You may move this binary to somewhere on your $PATH for convenience, but this is not strictly required.

Start FlightGear with the following options:

--telnet=$PORT --allow-nasal-from-sockets

Then launch nasali:

nasali $HOSTNAME $PORT

This opens an interactive session connected to your FlightGear instance.

$HOSTNAME should normally be localhost, but you can connect to a remote FlightGear instance too.

$PORT defaults to 5501, and must match the port you passed to the --telnet option.

This took about half an hour to write, so I'm sure there are plenty of bugs.

Known issues / caveats:

• Some Nasal commands return nil, but on a telnet connection, this will not produce any output at all, causing select() to time out. A reasonably short timeout has been selected, but if FG is struggling to keep up the performance, this could cause other responses to go missing; however, increasing the timeout means that legit nil responses take longer to appear.
• Nasal errors are not sent over telnet, and will thus not appear in the REPL. It is recommended to launch FG from a terminal, and keep that terminal visible next to the REPL, because that's where Nasal errors will be printed.