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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Sep 30 00:51:11 CEST 2009

skip at pobox.com wrote:

I have never completely wrapped my brain around optparse. Getopt I just remember.

Seems to me that optparse and argparse are fairly similar in their APIs, and that argparse isn't going to be significantly easier to fit in one's brain than optparse.

There's an art to coming up with an API that makes simple things easy and other things possible. I'm not convinced that argparse represents a subsantial enough advancement in that art to justify replacing optparse with it in the stdlib, and thereby forcing everyone to learn a similar-but-different API.

-- Greg

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