This is a collection of fairly trivial language extensions. They mostly address ease of use, but also consistency and completeness.
For ease of use,
I would like to add boolean operators and, or and not.
These are simple aliases for &&, || and !, with the same precedence.
Rationale: OpenSCAD is a 3D modelling tool for graphical designers. It should not assume prior experience with a C-like programming language. These names should be easier to understand.
I would like to support if (condition) expr else expr as an expression.
This is more readable than ..?..:.. when conditional code extends
over multiple lines, and is part of the unification of expression syntax
with statement syntax (making the language more consistent).
I would like to add an exponentiation operator, x^y,
as an alternative to pow(x,y).
It has higher precedence than *, and is right associative.
I would like to add an infix mod operator, with the same precedence as %,
except that unlike %, it correctly computes the modulus for both positive
and negative arguments.
a mod m == a - m*floor(a/m)
Reference: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Mod.html
Rationale: the name mod is more accessible to users without a background
in C-like programming languages, and answers a frequently asked question,
"where is the mod operator?".
Also, this mod operator has mathematically correct behaviour.
By contrast, our % operator is actually implemented by the C++ remainder operator %,
which computes an implementation-defined "remainder", not the modulus.
Currently, numbers are not first class values. That's because 1/0 prints as inf, and 0/0 prints as nan, but neither inf nor nan are valid expressions. Let's fix this.
For completeness, ucode(string) returns the numeric value of the first Unicode code point in string,
which is a non-empty string.
The result will be an integer between 1 and 0x10FFFF, or undef for a bad argument.
ucode is the dual of chr(number).