Eric Wilhelm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Ok, and maybe I showing my age here, but is *this* where the > negated-options thing comes from? I.E. is this the historic (and > entire) reason for having the 'foo!' syntax in Getopt::Long?
No, it's because of a) defaults. Sometimes a flag is enabled by default, sometimes its disabled by default. Having both the --foo and --no-foo options it is always possible to exactly define what you want the current invokation of the command to do, regardless of any default settings. It's user-friendly redundancy. And b) mixing options and arguments, where "--foo arg1 --no-foo arg2" means that arg1 is processed with --foo and arg2 with --no-foo. -- Johan
