Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
In realizing the white paper's desire to
"have the parser
provide the results to the program", it's likely that the mechanism
will, like Yacc, go beyond parsing and invoke semantic actions
as it identifies tree nodes.
I have to admit that all this feels like overkill. Parsing options
is only a very small part of the real work that a program does.
Speaking for myself, I want something simple and regular that will
get the job done and let me get on with the actual business of
my software. A grammar just for command-line argument parsing feels
like the tail wagging the dog: not nearly enough ROI, at least
for me.
I happen to like the getopt_long interface designed by the GNU
project. It's easy to learn, setup and use. Once it's in place
it's set and forget.
My two cents,
Arnold