Re: PATCH: help text: presentation of optionally-repeated arguments

On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 13:06, Julian Foad wrote:
> I don't see that "[OPTION]..." is ambiguous. Do you read it as
> "brackets mean zero or more; dots mean one or more" mean that

I read brackets as "zero or one" and dots as "one or more". In extended
regexp notation, "(foo?)+" is an ambiguous grammar--because any number
of empty strings matching "(foo?)" can be inserted into the
sequence--while "(foo+)?" is not. (As I said before, I think some
people find unambiguous grammars more intuitive, all other things being
equal.)

Thanks for rewriting the patch to my preference.

> My example of a possible reason was that it provides (as a free bonus)
> a convenient way to specify that a group of words may be repeated.
> However, this syntax cannot directly specify a group of words that may
> be repeated ONE OR MORE times. In that case I would need to write
> something like:
>
> cc -D SYMBOL [-D SYMBOL]...

Understood. I don't think that will ever be a concern for us.

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Received on Thu Jun 26 19:27:28 2003