[PEAK] options.txt

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:21 PM 11/30/04 -0500, R. David Murray wrote:

>I also love the option parsing facility itself, especially
>the automatic help text generation.

There, the credit goes to Optik/optparse; peak.running.options is just a 
wrapper over optparse where that's concerned.


>A metacomment on command parsing:  I have noticed over the years
>that in unix a lot of attention gets paid to automated parsing of
>options and very little to parsing arguments.  Coming from a VM/CMS
>and more lately Cisco IOS background I have a tendency to write
>commands that use structured arguments (subcommands, keywords)
>rather than options.  I'd love to have a facility like the option
>parser for laying out and parsing argument strings.  It doesn't
>seem to me that it would be very complicated to do, at least for
>straightforward arguments (and one shouldn't really have any other
>kind), so I've often wondered why it is neglected.

Well, maybe you could explain what you have in mind, or at least propose 
your ideal API spelling, so I have some idea of what you mean.  :)