Omari Norman wrote: > On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 05:31:00PM -0400, Jay Loden wrote: >> Robert Dailey wrote: >>> Well, I don't know what is wrong with people then. I don't see how >>> required arguments are of bad design. > >> I tend to agree...while "required option" may be an oxymoron in >> English, I can think of quite a few scripts I've written myself (in >> various languages) that needed at least some kind of user input to >> operate. > > The idea with optparse is not that programs should not require certain > information on the command line; rather, the idea is that this > information should be positional arguments, not 'options'. > > That is, to use the compiler example: > > compiler file > > is preferred if a file argument is necessary. > > compiler --file file > > is not preferred.
I agree with the optparse philosophy, but Practicality Beats Purity. That's why I was convinced to add "required options" to argparse -- there are too many applications that want that kind of interface. *I* don't write applications with interfaces like that, but enough people do that the use case should really be supported. STeVe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
