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From: rosenkra@convex.com (William Rosencranz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: standard practices
Message-ID: <1991Mar21.071029.2289@convex.com>
Date: 21 Mar 91 07:10:29 GMT
References: <1991Mar20.204257.26740@convex.com> <2231@lee.SEAS.UCLA.EDU>
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In article <2231@lee.SEAS.UCLA.EDU> plinio@crowe.seas.ucla.edu (Plinio Barbeito) writes:
>In article <1991Mar20.204257.26740@convex.com> rosenkra@convex.com (William Rosencranz) writes:
>>	-debug		to turn on internal debugging, if any
>
>In a beta release of something, but for a bugless program?

i never saw one :-). what is a "bugless program"?

>>	-help		to print a usage synopsis
>It would be nice to standardize this.  Do people prefer sticking to
>the cryptic (but quick to type and group) single-letter options names, 

i say stick to POSIX, whatever it may be, no matter how cryptic. at least
you would potentially only have to learn it once. i think few people
would be interested in *removing* what they expect in favor of tokens.
however, *adding* tokens (not really what i was thinking, but a reasonable
idea for novices) is fine.

>and typing the command without arguments to get usage info, or to chuck 

not all commands can be typed without args. stdin is usually inferred
as source of input.

>that pseudo-standard and start using descriptive tokens?

don't chuck anything (just as i was gettin used to unix after 6-7 years :-)

>Think what you are doing! You are trying to make Unix user-friendly,  
>and force programmers to document their code AT THE SAME TIME.  One of
>these would be unreasonable enough :-)

yikes! did i really say that? infinite and humblest apologies!!!! :-)

>Anyway, my two cents is that it's a tad too baroque.  Maybe the -help
>or -version options would be useful, but it seems like not all 
>applications would benefit from the clutter of informing the user that 
>he can use an option to see the debugging output, for example.  In the 
>interest of speed and size, debugging output should go by the wayside
>in most cases, IMHO.

ok, so skip the debug, tho i really think it can be valuable in debugging
user data errors, believe it or not, if you do the debug with that in
mind. the alternative is...what IS the alternative? proofread 100k of
data looking for a typo? i HOPE not...

>To sum things up, I think the usefulness of your suggestion will 
>depend on the specific application in mind ("tiny" versus "big enough
>to have an option called -verbose").

no. these are additional thinks which you can count on to exist in all
unix-like commands. it should be implicit. and not get in the way. i
think "cmd -help" does not get in the way, is very descriptive, easy
to remember, etc.

>plin
>--
>----- ---- --- -- ------ ---- --- -- - -  -  plinio@seas.ucla.edu 
>I don't think, I'm crazy.

no, you're not crazy...

-bill
rosenkra@convex.com

(i am...)
--
Bill Rosenkranz            |UUCP: {uunet,texsun}!convex!c1yankee!rosenkra
Convex Computer Corp.      |ARPA: rosenkra%c1yankee@convex.com