I have a long complicated piece of OpenSCAD code that I am trying to
simplify. The code generates shapes in a for loop, and modifies them. I
tried to use children(), but OpenSCAD unions the shapes generated in for
loops, so that didn't work. Here is a simplified example that doesn't work:

module translate_children() {
for (i=[0:$children-1])
translate([i*15, 0, 0])
children(i);
}

translate_children() {
for (j=[0:8])
cube([10, 10, 5]);
}

I could also simplify the code if OpenSCAD allowed me to pass a reference to a
function, but that isn't supported. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Can you  replace cube with mycube() so that you have

module mycube(j,x,y,z) {
foo(j) {
cube([x,y,z]);
}
}

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I mean putting the function into the loop, rather than the loop output into
the function:

for (j=[0:8])
mycube(j,[10, 10, 5]);

module mycube(i,d) {
translate([i*15,0,0])
cube(d);
}

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