On Jun 16, 2005, at 4:56 PM, Ovid wrote:
I'm sorry, while I certainly won't argue that there is necessarily a need for a new module here, I will argue that the order of arguments shouldn't matter. Asking for "foo" and then asking for "no foo" doesn't make a lick of sense to me. What does that mean? That we are in some mysterious heisenstate where the it's neither foo and not foo? In following the principle of least surprise, the user of a program should not have to worry about issues like this and I would prefer that contradictory command line arguments cause the program to halt with a loud "what the hell do you mean?"
For a counterexample, please see the -f and -i options to /bin/rm. Many people, myself included, have found it exceptionally useful that the final switch takes precedence, because then we can do things like "alias ls ls -i" and still be able to use the -f switch when we need to.
-Ken
