* On 03 Aug 2010, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 02:00:46PM +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
> > On 2010-08-02, Nicolas Williams <nicolas.willi...@oracle.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Right. There's no good convention for "end of list of arguments to an
> > > option". There's only a good convention for "end of variable argument
> > > list" ('--'), and since this is the closest thing...
> >
> > And since there _is_ a convention that '--' ends the option list, it's
> > A Bad Thing(TM) to use it for something else. I think violating the
> > almost universal convention about what '--' means is a terrible idea,
> > but apparently we're now stuck with it.
>
> The convention is that '--' ends the entire option list, not a list of
> arguments to a single option. Therefore mutt clearly uses something
> other than the existing convention.
Strictly speaking, no: since mutt requires the -a option to be last,
a '--' terminating the list of arguments to -a implicitly terminates
the option list as well. I think this may have been part of the design
consideration.
--
-D. d...@uchicago.edu IT Services University of Chicago
