Extra syntactic sugar

Basic operators

SolidPython overrides the basic operators + and | (union), - (difference), * and & (intersection) and ~ (debug). So

c = cylinder(r=10, h=5) + cylinder(r=2, h=30)

is the same as:

c = union()(
    cylinder(r=10, h=5),
    cylinder(r=2, h=30)
)

Likewise:

c = cylinder(r=10, h=5)
c -= cylinder(r=2, h=30)

is the same as:

c = difference()(
    cylinder(r=10, h=5),
    cylinder(r=2, h=30)
)

Access Style Syntax

Since at least some people (including me) don't like the OpenSCAD Syntax, SolidPython 2.x.x introduces the support for the so called "Access-Style-Syntax". This enables you to call some of the SolidPython / OpenSCAD functions as member functions of any OpenSCADObject instead of wrapping it in an instance of it.

In other words, e.g. code:

up(10)(cube(1))
#is equal to
cube(1).up(10)

The available member functions are the following:

union, difference, intersection, translate, scale, rotate, mirror, resize,
color, offset, hull, render, projection, surface, linear_extrude,
rotate_extrude, debug, background, root and disable

Also the convenience functions are available:

up, down, left, right, forward, fwd, back, translateX, translateY, translateZ,
rotateX, rotateY, rotateZ, mirrorX, mirrorY, mirrorZ, scaleX, scaleY, scaleZ,
resizeX, resizeY, resizeZ

Furthermore you can chain these functions, because they all return the transformed OpenSCADObject, e.g.:

cube(1).up(10).back(20).rotate(10, 0, 5).mirror(1, 0, 0).color("green").root()

Convenience functions

SolidPython includes a number of convenience functions. Currently these include:

Directions for arranging things:

up, down, left, right, forward, fwd, back

Transformations per dimension:

translateX, translateY, translateZ, rotateX, rotateY, rotateZ, mirrorX,
mirrorY, mirrorZ, resizeX, resizeY, resizeZ, scaleX, scaleY, scaleZ

Furthermore the operations translate, scale, resize, mirror, rotate, cube and square are overwritten in a way that they accept single integer or float values as first parameter. (translate(1, 2, 3) equals translate([1, 2, 3]))

cylinder().rotateY(90).up(10)

seems a lot clearer to me than:

translate([0,0,10])(
    rotate([0, 90, 0])(
      cylinder()
))