Sorry -- I agreed too fast with the original post, and am now agreeing
(more slowly and thoughtfully) with Jonathan's refutation of it.
He's right, we should be standard if we can. Also, it's very
convenient to allow options and arguments mixed -- that way if you
forgot something, you can just type it wherever you are and not worry.
"Jonathan S. Shapiro" <shap@eros-os.org> writes:
> > Good. It should also, then, be okay to require that all
> > options appear after the subcommand name. Viz.:
> >
> > svn <subcommand> [ <option> ... ] [ <arg> ...]
> >
> > Yes?
>
> NO. There is an existing standard command processing interface. It is called
> getopts(). It specifically (and by design) does *not* require that options
> appear before arguments.
>
> The existing standard may be stupid, but it is widely well understood and it
> isn't ugly. Unless there is a really *really* compelling reason to discard
> it, don't do so.
>
> It took fifteen bloody years to *regularize* the UNIX command interface!
>
> shap
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:11 2006