[Tutor] Argparse and how best to use it

[Paradox]

I am trying to learn about argparse and how best to incorporate it into 
my scripts.  I am using Python 2.7.5 on Ubuntu 13.10.

It seems from the argparse tutorial that all the arguments are processed 
as global variables.  Is that the standard way to do it or do you 
normally (when doing real projects and not writing tutorials) process 
the arguments in the main loop of the script?

thomas