In a message of Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:55:42 -0300, Collin Winter writes:

Honest question, having only read the docs about argparse: would it be possible to merge the functionality of argparse into optparse and so preserve a greater measure of backwards compatibility? Some of the stuff I'm reading about in http://argparse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/argparse-vs-optparse.html looks like it should be able to be integrated fairly easily into the existing optparse structure.

Collin Winter

Having looked at the code for optparse, I would say, no, hacking the optparse enhancements into optparse would be extremely difficult. optparse was designed by somebody who finds certain common patterns of option parsing (required options, parsing options passed as /whatever) such a terrible idea that preventing people from doing these things, even if they -really-, -really-, wanted to was a significant design goal. Laura