Ideas for a module to process command line arguments

[Alice Bevan–McGregor]

On 2011-01-11 21:41:24 -0800, Michele Simionato said:

> Originally plac too was able to recognize flags automatically by 
> looking at the default value (if the default value is a boolean then 
> the option is a flag); however I removed that functionality because I 
> wanted to be able to differentiate between flag and (smart) options 
> (see 
> http://micheles.googlecode.com/hg/plac/doc/plac.html#scripts-with-options-and-smart-options).

Not 
> 
entirely sure what you mean by 'smart' options.  If your'e referring to 
using a single hyphen and a list of characters to represent a long 
option (which, to the rest of the world, use two leading hyphens) then 
that's pretty weird.  ;)

Consider most of the GNU tools:

	ls -lvh
	tar -xzvf file.tgz (goes so far as to make the leading hyphen optional!)
	less -ceF logfile
	bc -qw
	ps -aux (same as tar)

And even third-party tools:

	mysql -fH
	pg_dump -abO ...

One major system in the world that doesn't really differentiate between 
long and short options is... DOS, and by extension, Windows.  But they 
also use / as a switch character.

Anyway; I'm happy with what I have wrought (and am continuing to update 
with support for class-based sub-command dispatch) and will be 
utilizing it for all scripts in the Marrow suite.  To each their own, 
but reinvention itself can be for motivations other than NIH.  I wanted 
something pure-Python, portable across the 3k barrier without code 
modification (no 2to3), that didn't use optparse, getopt, or argparse 
and basically be a translation layer.  It can be simpler than that, as 
marrow.script demonstrates.

	- Alice.