optparse - required options

[Steven Bethard]

Omari Norman wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 05:31:00PM -0400, Jay Loden wrote:
>> Robert Dailey wrote:
>>> Well, I don't know what is wrong with people then. I don't see how
>>> required arguments are of bad design.
> 
>> I tend to agree...while "required option" may be an oxymoron in
>> English, I can think of quite a few scripts I've written myself (in
>> various languages) that needed at least some kind of user input to
>> operate.
> 
> The idea with optparse is not that programs should not require certain
> information on the command line; rather, the idea is that this
> information should be positional arguments, not 'options'.
> 
> That is, to use the compiler example:
> 
> compiler file
> 
> is preferred if a file argument is necessary.
> 
> compiler --file file
> 
> is not preferred.

I agree with the optparse philosophy, but Practicality Beats Purity. 
That's why I was convinced to add "required options" to argparse -- 
there are too many applications that want that kind of interface.
*I* don't write applications with interfaces like that, but enough 
people do that the use case should really be supported.

STeVe