Monday, March 04, 2013
Ideas in parsing the command line
For any non-trivial script, even for personal consumption, it's necessary to supply usage text. The novelty of Lapp is that it starts from that point and defines a loose format for usage strings which can specify the names and types of the parameters.
An example will make this clearer:
-- scale.lua require 'lapp' local args = lapp [[ Does some calculations -o,--offset (default 0.0) Offset to add to scaled number -s,--scale (number) Scaling factor <number> (number ) Number to be scaled ]] print(args.offset + args.scale * args.number)
lua-users wiki: Lapp Framework
The thought of parsing the usage text for parsing the command line never occured to me, and I think it's brilliant.
Now, when I want to modify the command line of a program I wrote (and this is mostly in C, by the way), there are four locations I have to edit:
- An enumeration specifying the “short” form of the command line option
- A structure describing both the short and the long forms of a command line option
- A switch statement that processes the command line options from
getopt_long() - The text printed out describing the command line options
This method though, there's only one area I would have to edit.
Now granted, this is only for Lua, but I can't see why something similar for other languages can't be done.
An unholy mashup
I know some of my college friends will find this herectical, but what happens when you take Carly Rae Jepsen's “Call Me Maybe” and mix it with Nine Inch Nails' “Head Like A Hole”?
Oddly enough, you get something that works (link via GoogleFacePlusBook), kind of, maybe, in that “train-wreck cross-genre musical mashup” kind of way.
