On 11 February 2002, I said:
A good starting point for modules that compete with Optik can be found in "User Interfaces" section of the Vaults of Parnassus:
OK, I've looked at all the option-parsing packages listed in Parnassus. I've read the docs for all of them, and flipped through the source for some of them. Here's the executive summary: * only one of them, arglist.py by Ben Wolfson, has a nice OO design similar to Optik * the one feature that several of the competition offer but Optik does not (yet) is the ability to specify an option that *may* take a value, but doesn't necessarily *have to* take a value. Ironically, this is one of my requirements for the Distutils, motivated by the --home option to the "install" command. I think arglist.py is the only serious contender here. Based on my cursory inspection, all of the others have rather deep flaws. (Eg. they implement a non-standard syntax, or they do all their work at import time rather than providing a class to instantiate and do option-parsing work, or they have painful/awkward/hairy programming interface.) I'll attach my full notes. Anyone else who feels like doing this should start at the *bottom* of the list on Parnassus, since I devoted progressively less time and energy to each package along the way. ;-) Greg -- Greg Ward - geek gward@python.net http://starship.python.net/~gward/ Save energy: be apathetic.