Re: [Structuredtext-develop] option lists

[Alan J. <ja...@po...>]

On Sat, 23 Feb 2002, David Goodger wrote:
> Alan Jaffray wrote:
> > I don't see the value in the "dashes are implicit" behavior.  It loses
> > the ability to document non-GNU-style option lists.  What does it gain?
> 
> Once an option has been parsed and encoded in the doctree, the thing we're
> most interested in is the option name, not the punctuation that goes along
> with it.

In my mind, the name of a command line option is "-a" or "--force",
not "a" or "force".  Likewise for "-geom" (not "geom" X-style),
"/release" (not "release" DOS-style), or "co" (not "co" cvs-style).
Hyphens never get stripped, and there's no parsing involved, let
alone reparsing.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that the reStructuredText
parser is going to recognize "#$&foo" ("foo" martian-style) as part
of an option list. :)

>     <!ELEMENT option
>         ((short_option | long_option | vms_option), option_argument?)>
> 
> In order to support nonstandard options (i.e. options which don't conform to
> the above), I'd rather introduce a fourth type, perhaps
> ``nonstandard_option`` which either keeps the punctuation in the text or in
> an attribute: either ``<nonstandard_option>-long-option-with-one-hypen</>``
> or ``<nonstandard_option marker="-">long-option-with-one-hyphen</>``. Is it
> necessary?

I think it's at least desirable; but then, once it's created, I don't
understand the need for the other options.  When does one need to know
whether a given option is short, long, trapezoidal, or whatever?

> > There's a huge amount of existing software that uses single-dash long
> > options.
> 
> I wonder if any of that is a target audience for reStructuredText? ;-)

Possibly.  There's also a lot of new software that uses single-dash
long options.  Any new X program ought to support -geometry and -font.
There's also the situation of someone writing internal docs describing
a program for their users.

> still-haven't-read-perl-getopt::long-ly yr's --David

I didn't expect you would.  I've never managed to make it all the way
through myself. :-)

Alan