Am I reading this wrong, or is std.getopt *really* this stupid?

[H. S. Teoh]

I just ran into this seemingly small problem:

	void main(string[] args) {
		string[] searchPaths;
		getopt(args,
			"l", (string opt, string arg) {
				// searches through searchPaths
				openFile(arg);
			},
			"I", (string opt, string arg) {
				searchPaths ~= arg; 
			},
			...
		);
	}

Running the program with:

	program -I /path/to -l myfile

causes a runtime error that 'myfile' cannot be found, even though it
actually exists in /path/to/*.  I thought it was odd, since obviously
the -I is parsed before the -l, so searchPaths should already be set
when -l is seen, right?

Well, looking at the implementation of std.getopt turned up the
disturbing fact that the program's argument list is actually scanned
*multiple times*, one for each possible option(!).  Besides the bogonity
that whether or not searchPaths will be set prior to finding -l depends
on the order of arguments passed to getopt(), this also represents an
O(n*m) complexity in scanning program arguments, where n = number of
arguments and m = number of possible options.

And this is not to mention the fact that getoptImpl is *recursive
template*.  Why, oh why?

Am I the only one who thinks the current implementation of getopt() is
really stupid??  Can somebody please talk some sense into me, or point
out something really obvious that I'm missing?


T

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