I remember seeing a bit of discussion about improving Python's default options parsing... Tornado's seems very impressive [1]:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">

<pre><div class="line" id="LC27"><span class="kn">from</span> <span class="nn">tornado.options</span> <span class="kn">import</span> <span class="n">define</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">options</span></div>

</pre><pre><div class="line" id="LC29"><span class="n">define</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="s">"port"</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">default</span><span class="o">=</span><span class="mf">8888</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">help</span><span class="o">=</span><span class="s">"run on the given port"</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="nb">type</span><span class="o">=</span><span class="nb">int</span><span class="p">)</span></div>

</pre><pre><span class="p"></span><span class="n">print options</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">port</span></pre></blockquote><div>What does everyone think?<br><br>- Andrey<br> </div>1. <a href="http://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/9a8bd2fb6fd6279be16d6f0a2e57e49fe1b98f8f/demos/chat/chatdemo.py">http://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/9a8bd2fb6fd6279be16d6f0a2e57e49fe1b98f8f/demos/chat/chatdemo.py</a><br>