Casey wrote: > Ben Finney wrote: >> I believe they shouldn't because the established interface is that a >> hyphen always introduced an option unless (for those programs that >> support it) a '--' option is used, as discussed. > > Not "THE" established interface; "AN" established interface. There > are other established interfaces that have different behaviors. I'm a > pragmatist; I write software for users, not techies. I suspect most > users would expect a command like "abc -a -921 351 175" to treat the > "-921" as a negative integer and not abort the program with some > obscure error about option 921 not being known.
Glad I'm not alone in this. ;-) A user shouldn't have to go out of their way to specify regular numbers on the command line, regardless of whether they're positive or negative. STeVe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list