R. David Murray added the comment: This behavior is inherited from optparse. I think it is more-or-less intentional, and in any case it is of long enough standing that I don't think we can change it. We documented it for optparse in another issue, but I don't think we made the corresponding improvement to the argparse docs. ---------- assignee: -> docs@python components: +Documentation nosy: +bethard, docs@python, r.david.murray versions: +Python 3.2, Python 3.3, Python 3.4 _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue16399> _______________________________________