RE: [boost] Re: Preliminary submission: command line & config fil e library

From: Rozental, Gennadiy (gennadiy.rozental_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-01-15 13:12:47

> Hmm... can you provide error messages?

Will do later today.
 
> I would say that it's a big question how much flexibility is 
> needed. My 
> position is that the command line should not go beyond 
> existing styles.

Could you list all existent styles? Does your parser supported all of them?

> Can you suggest some style which require chain_lookup_policy and still
> legible for users?

For example, one what in one parser mix of named and positional parameters.
Every token that does not fit for any named parameter will be considered
positional (the same effect though could be achieved with 2 separate parsers
- but you asked for example)

> I don't know how to compare number of people who need command 
> line to the 
> number of people who *also* need config file. I suppose that 
> as your program
> grows bigger, you're likely to need config file too. The 
> transition should
> be simple.

And again I argue that at least 90% of cla framework users will never have a
need for anything else (IMHO). That does not mean that we should not provide
support for reading of config files - just no need to couple them together.

> "parameter extraction policy" or "parameter search policy" 
> sound better.

How search policy is better than lookup policy?

> Oh.. it's even more complicated! Are your command line 
> syntaxes that complicated?

No. But this way I could parse out UDT from command line input.

> > my_program <debug>true</debug> <delay><seconds>2</seconds></delay>
> 
> Do you really think that there is *one* user who would be happy with
> this command line style?

Well, you easily agree that XML could be used in config files, but could not
imagine it's usage in command line?
What if the command line is auto generated?
One may want to use XML style cla to supply complex multi level arguments,
for example.

Gennadiy.