I used to love doctopt, but with usage your realise:
- i18n is made hard
- syntax errors are not caught by tooling
- you don't get automatic args checking or env var override
Eventually, a well made programmative API is better.
- i18n is made hard
- syntax errors are not caught by tooling
- you don't get automatic args checking or env var override
Eventually, a well made programmative API is better.
My main issues were that the author of docopt doesn't know anything about language grammars & parsing. That's fine — we all start somewhere. But he insists that defining a grammar (and having a rational parser) aren't useful or even possible! If, instead, there were a normative spec (and this requires only the slightest change to edge-cases that aren't tested by his test-suite, anyways), then it'd be possible to really roll out a much more robust docopt than what currently occurs.
With a grammar you'd be able to roll out AST=>AST transforms, and update the parsing strategy of the command lines, i.e., portability between CLI flavors between new/old style POSIX, Windows, etc. You'd have the ability to do i18n, you could catch errors both in the docopt spec of your parser, and in the parsing of the command line options, etc.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of mow.cli ;)
It's also mostly redundant. I'd expect CLI users to be able to parse flags and --help messages in english.
And I'm not saying it as a native english speaker -- which I'm not. Without english knowledge you can't parse 99% of existing, never to be i18n standard UNIX commands, flags, and manpages.
That makes me sad.
But for text work (writing, reading, etc).
Not on my fucking programming languages (like bizarro foreign variable names in source code), and ideally, not on my CLI either.
Let's have a common universal language in our domain.
Doctors get to use latin names and common terms for tons of medical staff whatever their country. Pilots get to speak english with every control tower all around the world.
Computer work should have some of that too.
Now, if you mean "actual UNIX", I'm not sure - but at least gnu is pretty widely translated. Not sure where the bsds stand on this.
Most of the standard GNU commands are translated, at least I can't think of any which is not.