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Arg decoding with a template?

David Bolen db3l at fitlinxx.com
Tue Jul 31 14:58:05 EDT 2001 
Dale Strickland-Clark <dale at riverhall.NOSPAMco.uk> writes:

> "Steve Holden" <sholden at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> 
> OK, I've had a good look at this now.
> 
> It's hideous!
> 
> It's no wonder that people get fed up with computers if they get
> given a user interface that expects pointless dashes all over the
> place.
> 
> You simply can't use this routine to code a nice arg string.

I suppose that's a matter of taste.  Certainly in the Unix domain,
from whence this arose, where virtually everything was traditionally
done via the command line, all command line utilities parse their
command lines in exactly this way, it's extremely consistent and
trying to do other manual approaches actually makes the non-conformant
application stand out as such.

In effect, such command line parsing is a standard interface, much as
under Windows, there's standard UI elements in its GUI.  It's also
(unlike a GUI) designed as much for efficiency and flexibility as
looks.

You'll find that it's a flexible interface for something that has to
deal with a textual command line.  Try designing a CLI parser that has
optional arguments, arguments with and without values even with
multi-character options, spacing and order insensitive, and so on, and
you'll find yourself replicating much of the getopt behavior.

Personally, since DOS/Windows command line applications never really
formed such consistency (IMO), and at least for me I find "-" less
glaring on the command line than "/", I find the use of a getopt
conformant command line to be nice as well as consistency
cross-platform.

I don't know what particular user interface you are looking to serve,
so if you're comparing this to some GUI interface to obtain
parameters, that's not apples to apples.  But if you're working
strictly with a command line, I wouldn't necessarily jettison getopt
summarily.

--
-- David
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