As it works today, it's not possible to do stuff like this:

if(colorit){
    color([...])
}
sphere(10);

This is a simple canse, but often, you want to have one/several conditional
step in a large pile of operations, more code than I'd like to duplicate.

So, I usually have to resort to something like this instead:

module ifcolor(condition,color){
    if(condition){
        color(color)
        children();
    }else{
        children();
    }
}

ifcolor(colorit,[...])
sphere(10);

While it works, I find myself ending up with many if* variants which make
very little sense outside that context.

So, what I'd like is either to have the if working as one might expect it to
work in the first example, of have some more generic module that mimics what
I do in my module, which takes as an argument the operations to do.

Since it doesn't work at all today, it wouldn't, as far as I can see, break
any existing code.

It would make a lot of code much, much cleaner.

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There have been plenty of times I've wanted to do things like this too.
There are often ways around it. With the current features, you can't
conditionally color something or leave it un-colored, but you can set the
color conditionally by using a ternary operator like this:

color(condition ? [.2, .3, .4] : "grey") {
sphere(10);
}

I'd really like to be able to do this with the ! * # % operators, but
there's definitely no way to do that without duplicating code currently.
The closes you can get would be putting the code that would otherwise be
duplicated in a module, so that only the module call needs to appear on
both sides of the "else".

On February 4, 2020 at 02:00:36, Troberg (troberg.anders@gmail.com) wrote:

As it works today, it's not possible to do stuff like this:

if(colorit){
color([...])
}
sphere(10);

This is a simple canse, but often, you want to have one/several conditional
step in a large pile of operations, more code than I'd like to duplicate.

So, I usually have to resort to something like this instead:

module ifcolor(condition,color){
if(condition){
color(color)
children();
}else{
children();
}
}

ifcolor(colorit,[...])
sphere(10);

While it works, I find myself ending up with many if* variants which make
very little sense outside that context.

So, what I'd like is either to have the if working as one might expect it
to
work in the first example, of have some more generic module that mimics
what
I do in my module, which takes as an argument the operations to do.

Since it doesn't work at all today, it wouldn't, as far as I can see, break
any existing code.

It would make a lot of code much, much cleaner.

--
Sent from: http://forum.openscad.org/

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You can, but don't get stuck on color. I just used that for a clean example.
It could just as well be the other operations, or several of them.

If course, you can also do algebraic ifs for translate/rotate, but it's
really not good, readable code.

There are heaps of workarounds, but none of them are really what I would
consider "good coding practice".

--
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