Re: [Chicken-users] building readline extension on OSX problem: csc include directory (-I switch)

[Ed Watkeys]

On Aug 30, 2004, at 3:53 PM, felix wrote:

> address@hidden wrote:
> > On 30 Aug 2004, Ed Watkeys <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > Since the subject came up... I would suggest adhering to the GNU 
> > > standards regarding command-line options.
> > Seconded.
> > > That would mean double dashes for verbose options, and single dashes 
> > > for single-character optons. Additionally, there would be a verbose 
> > > option for each single-character one. Here's a useful document:
> > >
> > > http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_18.html
> > And as chicken already supports SRFI-37
> > ( http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-37/srfi-37.html )
> > it should be easy to implement.
>
> I have to admit that I'm no fan of the double hyphen.

Neither was I, but I became a fan for a very simple reason: It makes 
any multi-character option that starts with a single dash unambiguously 
a set of single-character options. You can have a single-character and 
a verbose version of each option, allowing either compactness or 
clarity, and there is no possibility of ambiguity.

This is one of those things that should change soon -- or never. I'm 
sure that if GCC didn't have a billion Makefiles that depended on its 
non-standard command-line options, it would have been changed a long 
time ago.

Regards,
Ed

P.S. I came around to the GNU way of option parsing despite my intense 
antipathy toward nearly everything RMS stands for.

--
Watkeys Product Design
http://watkeys.com/