Command line parsing

[Jon D via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 14 May 2016 at 13:17:05 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
>
> I showed a fellow programmer std.getopt. We were both on 
> laptops. He wanted to show me how good Python's argparse is and 
> how D should copy it. By the end of the chat it was obvious 
> argparse was much more verbose and less pleasant to use than 
> getopt. Like you have to create an object (?!?!) to parse the 
> command line and many other lines of nonsense.
>
I've found D's getopt package to be pretty good. There are a 
number of small things that could make it quite a bit better. To 
me these generally appear more the result of limited usage rather 
than anything fundamentally wrong with the design.

For example, error text produced when a run-time argument doesn't 
match the option spec is often not helpful to the user who 
entered the command, and I've found I need to take steps to 
address this. A package like Perl's Getopt::Long tends to a bit 
more mature in some of these details.

--Jon