[Python-Dev] PEP 389: argparse - new command line parsing module (original) (raw)

Yuvgoog Greenle ubershmekel at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 17🔞45 CEST 2009

* Would you be opposed to a note in the getopt documentation suggesting argparse as an alternative?

from the top of http://docs.python.org/library/getopt.html - "A more convenient, flexible, and powerful alternative is the optparse module."I think this statement should be emphasized better but it's already there so no worries.

Argparse/optparse use a parser instance and getopt doesn't. I think that's a saved line you have to keep saving so this would be the better syntax imho: optlist, args = argparse.getopt(args, 'abc:d:')

I was thinking on the general issue of what's better for the std-lib:

  1. Mini modules - 3+ small modules in each subject that can be useful in different contexts. For example the xml libs. or
  2. Big modules - 1 uber-module for each subject that does everything. Maybe logging is an example of this.

I think in general python std-lib went the path of mini modules. Its advantages

  1. Each mini module can be coherent and while python isn't really OnlyOneWayToDoIt, each module in itself has OnlyOneWayToDoIt.
  2. Documentation is less cluttered by a large amount of functions that all do the same thing but differently. This is very important for python's learning curve.

disadvantages:

  1. You have to craft your documentation carefully as to be very explicit on why you have all these modules for the same thing. Probably each module should explain it's purpose in relation to the other modules and this explanation should appear at the top of the documentation of each of the mini modules in the subject. Today it would be very hard for me to figure out how the xml modules interrelate, urllib has improved in python3 but still isn't perfect.
  2. I could be using some silly way of doing things (getopt) while I really wanted to do it the good way (argparse).

I think that while adding getopt functionality to argparse might be nice but would eventually cause clutter. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20090928/6c30da8f/attachment.htm>

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