Here we describe an implementation of the cylindrical distribution function (CDF) based on fast open source Python libraries, which is particularly well suited to anisotropic systems such as liquid crystals. The CDF eschews the radial binning used for g(r) and g1(r) in favour of cylindrical bins in order to preserve information on anisotropic positional order. The CDF is a logical progression from the anisotropic forms of the RDF shown in equations 2 and 3, as both parallel and perpendicular components are considered simultaneously. In its simplest form, the cylindrical distribution function is defined here as