Re: Command line processing opens up can of worms :>

[Rob Browning]

Dirk Herrmann <address@hidden> writes:

> To the second point:  Independent of the first point it could still be
> possible to read arbitrary objects within the #! ... !# header, as long as
> it is guaranteed that they will afterwards be re-converted to strings. I
> don't know whether this is preferable over to demand from the user to only
> pass strings as options anyway.

Thanks for responding.  It looks like you've got the picture exactly.
At this point, I'm thinking that the simplest semantics that make both
the implementation and the understanding straightforward are to just
specify that "read" is used to parse all of the arguments after the
second line of the script and before the !#, and any non-string
arguments are immediately reverted to strings via a "write to string".

This is easy to understand, and easy to do, but does anyone see any
big problems?  I'll go ahead and fix my implementation to work this
way, and see how I like it.

> In any case, I like the simplicity and well-definedness (strange word :-)
> of the approach to read #! ... !# contents with (read), and I think this
> is something we should stick to.

I agree - no fancy by-hand parsing required.  I like that.

> BTW, your thoughts and ideas could be valuable for the discussion of the
> SRFI-22...

Interesting, I had no idea that was pending, though from a cursory
glance, it looks like it doesn't address multiple line arguments,
thought I guess it could be extended to.

I'll have to see what's involved in joining the discussion.

Thanks

-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930