* Johan Vromans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-06-18 23:20]: > Eric Wilhelm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Is '--un-' not distinctive enough? > > I believe there's more involved that adding the --un- > semantics. For example, precedence order parsing yields > different results from left to right parsing.
I agree that “--un-” alone is not distinctive – you want something that tells the user “this *looks* *so* different that it probably *behaves* differently too,” and simply using an “un” prefix to the option is not enough for that. OTOH, with a switch like “--no-default-fish” the semantics should be obvious from the description itself. In this respect the “un” prefix is really horribly chosen. I don’t know about anyone else here, but if I saw that I could tell this hypothetical shopping application that I want “--un-fish”, I’d have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, whereas the meaning of “--fish blah” or “--no-fish” (in the traditional sense of the “no” prefix!) is immediately obvious. > Something like ++ instead of --. I think that’s ugly. I’d suggest simply addding another dash to signify the altered precedence, as in “---”. It is also slightly evocative in a linguistic sense as the ASCII rendering of an em-dash, so you could think of it as a break in the “sentence” you’re writing on the command line — something that can be added as an afterthought, like the subclause you’re reading right now. For this hypothetical shopping application I’d probably be most inclined to have a “--no-default” switch which takes a type or a list thereof as its argument, so the user could say “--no-default fish,meat,fruit”. With the tripple dash, I’d call it something else (though I don’t quite know what), but it’d work the same way. Regards, -- Aristotle “Like punning, programming is a play on words.” – Alan J. Perlis, “Epigrams in Programming”
