Re: Interesting handling of command line arguments
On Mon, 20 Jan 2003 09:47:49 +0100, "Fischer, Oliver" said:
Chris Palmer wrote:
> The GNU getopts behavior would be to treat "--he" (and "-he" and
"-h")
> as short for "--help". Personally I like that behavior, and making a new
> file called "-he" would be strange to me.
But this does xemacs already....
XEmacs - surprising and astounding users since 1995! :)
Just because it already implements counterintuitive behavior is no reason
to keep doing so. I'm having a *really* hard time thinking of any *other*
program that implements --gnu-style options with a double-dash that does NOT
do The Expected Thing with all unambiguous abbreviations for a legal option.
The GNU getopts behavior is a de facto standard, and doing something else
is a violation of the Principle of Least Astonishment (among other things,
should 'xemacs --hepl' invoke usage() or should it open the file as specified?)
And there is no typo in the preceding line of text - it's a serious UI question.
:)
/Valdis (who obviously hasn't learned to not post at 5AM ;)
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