Re: Command line processing opens up can of worms :>

[Rob Browning]

(Hope this gets through.  My DNS has been a little off today...)

Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:

> You could also say
> 
>   #! /usr/bin/guile \
>   -x '(display "\"hello all\"\n")'
>   !#

OK.  I think providing both ' and " might address most of my concerns,
allowing you to avoid backslash hell in most cases, and shouldn't be
any worse than the read/write-to-string approach on that front in
general.

So lets presume I write a simple string parser that knows about ', ",
\", \', and \\, and it works.  If so, does anyone have any remaining
objections?  If not, I'll do that and commit it.

So

  -x '(foo bar)'
  -c "(aaa bbb)"

will come in as ("-x" "(foo bar)" "-c" "(aaa bbb")) and I'll handle
skipping unquoted whitespace with char-whitespace?.

Before 1.6, I think I'd also like to move some of the guile-config
code into an ice-9 module.  Guile should have functions for grabbing
the config info (like building the right compile/link command)
available at runtime -- this is important for compilation and tools
like g-wrap.  There doesn't seem to be any reason to require people to
"exec" guile-config from guile proper.

> > I don't know, really.  I'm happy with changing my code to do whichever
> > people prefer.
> 
> I'm no really sure, as well.  Just using `read' has a certain kind
> of appeal, but `read' is quite a big hammer.  Additionally, I would
> expect that people want to have more complicated on the command
> line, as opposed to in the meta-args line of a script.

You may well be right, but I just want to make sure to the meta args
as clear and reasonably useful as possible.

-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930