getopt with negative numbers?

[Casey]

Is there an easy way to use getopt and still allow negative numbers as
args?  I can easily write a workaround (pre-process the tail end of
the arguments, stripping off any non-options including negative
numbers into a separate sequence and ignore the (now empty) args list
returned by getopt, but it would seem this is such a common
requirement that there would be an option to treat a negative value as
an argument.  Note that this is only a problem if the first non-option
is a negative value, since getopt stops processing options as soon as
it identifies the first argument value.

Alternatively, does optparse handle this?  I haven't used optparse (I
know it is more powerful and OO, but you tend to stick with what you
know, especially when it is part of my normal python programming
template), but if it handles negative numbers I'm willing to learn it.