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From: karlton@decwrl.dec.com (Philip Karlton)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: For comment: problems with toolkit arg processing/philosophy
Message-ID: <127@bacchus.DEC.COM>
Date: Fri, 6-Nov-87 16:13:53 EST
Article-I.D.: bacchus.127
Posted: Fri Nov  6 16:13:53 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Nov-87 19:48:39 EST
References: <871106083928.4.RWS@KILLINGTON.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: karlton@decwrl.UUCP (Philip Karlton)
Organization: DEC Western Software Lab, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 24

>Date: Mon, 2 Nov 87 15:21:44 PST
>From: bilbo.geoff@CS.UCLA.EDU (     Geoff Kuenning)
...
>	This bug brings up a much larger issue, which is the X
>	project's approach to argument design.  The standard for
>	command-line arguments, adopted by AT&T, Sun, and the Posix
>	groups, calls for single-character flags only, with
>	arguments accepted either concatenated or separate.  The
>	ONLY acceptable leadin character is "-";  negating flags
>	with "+" or using special characters such as "=" to indicate
>	certain types of arguments are not allowed.  
...

It is not intended that X only be available on a single operating system.
There is no single convention that will make everybody happy. The X community
has to decide if it wants to pick a single method convention or leave that up
to the vender/OS. Note that if the user interface is going to be different on
each platform, not only will the code have to be changed, but the
documentation as well.

In the future this may become less of an issues. One would expect that as more
applications move from having teletype oriented user interfaces to having full
screen interfaces, the need for parsing "command lines" would be reduced.

PK