3 ms·

Trouble is that some competing approaches appeared around the same time in history and what is convention depends on what you happened to be exposed to.

• riffraff 5y ago
  Honest question: the BSDs adopted getoptlong() 20 years ago[0], what are people being exposed to that uses -single-dash-long-options?[1] Or were you referring to older utilities/actual unix times? [0] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=getopt_long&sektion=3&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+13.0-RELEASE+and+Ports https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=getopt_long&sektio... [1] I mean, there's oddities such as openssl(1) but those seem a minority on every platform
  • everybodyknows 5y ago
    > what are people being exposed to that uses -single-dash-long-options? Go's 'flag' package -- although double-dash is silently accepted on the command line. The deeper issue with 'flag' is that it rejects the BSD convention of a short/long option pair having guaranteed equivalent semantics e.g. -h/--help. The library just won't let the programmer create such a pair by means of its standard functions.
    • randomdata 5y ago
      > Go's 'flag' package Which uses the Plan 9 convention; the system the Go creators were exposed to. A good example of competing conventions of the past rearing itself in modern tools.