The Python standard library introduced argparse a decade ago in Python 2.7 to replace optparse as described in PEP-0389 for command line argument parsing. Optparse is no longer maintained, and has been deprecated since Python 3.2, although there are no plans to remove it from the std library.
As part of modernizing CQLSH, I have proposed in CASSANDRA-17914 that we upgrade from optparse to argparse. Argparse is part of the Python standard library and has been since 2011 so this upgrade involves no new library dependencies and should be self-contained and transparent. The primary benefit is removing dependencies on deprecated classes and components. Consensus seems to be that argparse has more meaningful help messages and is more intuitive to use. Regards, Brad Schoening
