[Python-Dev] Pronouncement on PEP 389: argparse?

[Steven Bethard]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:33 AM, Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ian Bicking wrote:
>> If argparse doesn't do this, then I think at least it should give good
>> error messages for all cases where these optparse-isms remain.  For
>> instance, now if you include %prog in your usage you get: ValueError:
>> unsupported format character 'p' (0x70) at index 1 -- that's simply a
>> bad error message.  Giving a proper error message takes about as much
>> code as making %prog work.  I don't feel strongly that one is better
>> than the other, but at least one of those should be done.
>
> I agree (and I've used both for quite a long time).  argparse has an api
> that is almost compatible with optparse in many common cases, but just
> renamed some things.

I can definitely improve some of the error messages for people coming
from optparse. I've created an issue for this, with the ``type='int'``
and "%prog" problems in there:

http://code.google.com/p/argparse/issues/detail?id=51

If you have other things that you know you'd like better exceptions
for, please add to that issue and I'll take care of it.

Steve
-- 
Where did you get that preposterous hypothesis?
Did Steve tell you that?
        --- The Hiphopopotamus