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I'm trying to spread a collection of synapses uniformly across multiple dendritic compartments. Currently I'm doing this by specifying a distance, say 20 microns, then starting at the most distal point on a distal dendrite, I work my way inwards toward the soma. The problem is that I have to constantly check whether or not the next synapse will have to placed on the parent dendritic compartment. Though doing it this way works, is there a more clever way to use the distance() function to find out where to put the synapse.

For example, say the distal dendrite is 50 microns, and the synapse spacing is 20 microns. Then could I use the distance() function for the 3rd synapse which has to be placed 10 microns from the end of the distal dendrite's parent?

Unless all segments are 20 um long (and they won't be, unless all section lengths are integer multiples of 20 um), multiple synaptic mechanisms will be attached to each segment. If the mechanisms have identical dynamics and equilibrium potentials, it would be much easier to attach one instance to each segment, and drive them with as many NetCons as are appropriate for your implementation. For example, each mechanism needs only one NetCon if you intend to drive all synapses synchronously from a single spike source ("presynaptic cell" or maybe you prefer to use precalculated spike times loaded into the event queue with NetCon event()), but if you want asynchronous input streams, each segment's synaptic mechanism must be the target of int(0.5 + L/nseg) NetCons, each of which has its own spike source.