Guido van Rossum wrote:
[Mark]
Basically _every_ time I use getopt, I write code like this:
[Marc-Andre]
Why not just add a higher level interface ? Something like CommandLine.py which is included in mxDateTime ?
[Mark]
Because _every_ time I use getopt, I write code like that :-)
[Marc-Andre]
I wrote the CommandLine.py for pretty much the same reason:
Marc-Andre, you're not hearing what Mark is saying. He wants a change to the standard library, and he knows that small additions to existing modules there stand a better chance of adoption than new modules.
Oh, I did get the idea... just wanted to plug my module here in a take-it-or-leave-it way ;-) I usually put such things into my lib/ dir for Python to find -- no need to make them a standard.
I personally liked the idea of getoptex() best, except I would call it getopt_or_die(). If the usage message is omitted it can synthesize one from the (short and long) options arguments and sys.argv[0] (the latter being a bit controversial, but it's just a default).
Hmm... Perhaps getopt_or_die() shouldn't take the args argument but extract sys.argv[1:] itself?
Better not: it's sometimes very useful to call the main(args) function of a script in interactive mode which then passes the args list to getopt(). How about adding something like: def getoptex(...,args=None,helptext='Read the source, Luke ;-)'): if args is None: args = sys.argv[1:] ... -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Y2000: 92 days left Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/