I believe GP's remarks are that single hyphen followed by letters should each be individual flags, and double hyphen followed letters is a single flag in long form.

The application in question is using -generate rather than --generate.

oarsinsync is correct.

The standard on most UNIX-like OSes is that long options, e.g. --long, have two dashes, and short options, e.g. -l, have one.

It allows you to combine multiple options into one. For example, the following two commands are equivalent:

    $ ls -laF
    $ ls -l -a -F