Open-source brep-capable CAD tool w openscad-like language?

I would love to see an open-source CAD program with these features:

• BREP support (rather than just CSG)
• dimension / annotation capability (to facilitate documentation as well as just sending straight to a CNC machine/reprap)
• openscad-like programming/scripting language

I am very fond of Openscad's language - but (to the best of my knowledge) it only does CSG. I am also fond of the opencascade-based modellers FreeCAD and HeeksCAD - but they lack openscad's elegant programming language. FreeCAD has Python scripting ability - which I suppose could be very powerful (if one is sufficiently familiar with Python) - but it seems quite cumbersome compared to openscad.

If anyone knows of, e.g. an opencascade-based or other brep-capable modeller with an openscad-like interface/language, I would be very interested. The ability to add dimensions and/or annotations to drawings would be a bonus!

As far as I am aware there is nothing like this available at the moment (I reckon I would have heard about it otherwise), but might there be something in the works? Might NeroCAD satisfy these criteria in the future?

P.S. I'm a fan of POV-Ray but it's designed for photo-realistic rendering rather than CAD/engineering - not really what I have in mind.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2011 02:39AM by dslc.

Looks like a good opportunity to jump in and enhance FreeCADs scritpting capabilities.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

HeeksCAD isn't quite there but going in that direction. With the HeeksPython plugin, it's possible to create geometry using python as the scripting language.

The HeeksCNC plugin provides the ability to generate g-code and send directly to a cnc machine. I'm fairly certain this works with at least emc2/axis but I don't use the feature.

HeeksCNC doesn't have any features for additive machining yet so nothing for reprap printing right now.

Dimensions work as do multiple coordinate systems.

The project recently migrated to github [github.com] but most of the limited end-user documentation is still on [code.google.com]

Maybe you're right Markus. I don't really know FreeCAD (or Python) well enough to tell whether or not that's viable to be honest. I will say though ... Scripting features aside, the GUI is more sophisticated than I had previously thought; and the more I experiment with and get to know FreeCAD, the more I like it. It's drafting module is very nice, and includes at least preliminary dimensioning ability. Naturally, it can export STL; so it's probably viable for reprap users to test it out already (even though it's still only an alpha version).

@sliptonic: I have only tried Heekscad on Linux via the wine emulator so far. I suppose I should try a native Linux version to give it a fair appraisal - but I think I need to compile it first .