This probably goes against everything a shell based platform wants, but would it be possible to give the program a sub-like signature?
I ask this after another painful session of forgetting how things work, reading Getopt::Long's documentation.
signature ( Rule $pattern, bool +$help :short('h'), Int +$verbose :short('v'), Str [EMAIL PROTECTED] = <-> );
With GNU-like parsing, this'd make
@*ARGS = < foo|bar --verbose 2 first second third >;
@*ARGS = < foo|bar -vv first second third >;
result in the lexical variables
$pattern = rx/foo|bar/; $help = false; $verbose = 2; @files = < first second third >;
and
@*ARGS = < foo -- -v --verbose --help forth fifth sixth >;
in
$pattern = rx/foo/; $help = false; $verbose = undef; @files = < -v --verbose --help forth fifth sixth >;
and
@*ARGS = < pattern >
in
$pattern = rx/pattern/;
$help = false;
$verbose = undef;
@files = ('-');
Probably a macro can handle this, but does (will) Perl parse a signature-like argument list and hand the macro something it can use, or would this require source-filter like trickery?
Would this actually be any better than the interface provided by Getopt::Long? I suspect that it's possible, and I also suspect that Getopt::Long can be written in a much friendlier manner for Perl 6 (not that I have any particular complaints about how it handles things now, but it can certainly be better).
I do feel that command-line option parsing should not be built into the language though - let modules take care of it, then we'll never have to worry about pushing some built-in mechanism aside when we want to do something peculiar.
What you want may well be possible with a module though - or something similar to it.
