[Python-Dev] Pronouncement on PEP 389: argparse? (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon Dec 14 20:48:53 CET 2009

On 12/14/2009 1:43 PM, Steven Bethard wrote:

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Ian Bicking<ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Steven Bethard <steven.bethard at gmail.com> wrote:

So there wasn't really any more feedback on the last post of the argparse PEP other than a typo fix and another +1.

I just converted a script over to argparse. It seems nice enough, I was doing a two-level command, and it was quite handy for that. One concern I had is that the naming seems at times trivially different than optparse, just because "opt" or "option" is replaced by "arg" or "argument". So .addoption becomes .addargument, and OptionParser becomes ArgumentParser. This seems unnecessary to me, and it make converting the application harder than it had to be. It wasn't hard, but it could have been really easy. There are a couple other details like this that I think are worth resolving if argparse really is supposed to replace optparse. Thanks for the feedback. Could you comment further on exactly what would be sufficient? It would be easy, for example, to add a subclass of ArgumentParser called OptionParser that has an addoption method. Do you also need the following things to work? [snip]

I have not ever used optparse. So if I were to use argparse in the future, I would strongly prefer that it be free of back-compatibility cruft.

Would it be possible to use the 2to3 machinery to write an opt_to_arg conversion tool? This could easily take care of the naming differences.

Terry Jan Reedy

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