[issue46700] wrong nomenclature (options vs. arguments) in argparse

[mirabilos]

mirabilos  added the comment:

Hm, the change helps indeed. I did this in my code:

p = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='…', add_help=False)
g = p.add_argument_group('Options')
g.add_argument('-h', action='help', help='show this help message and exit')
g.add_argument(………
g = p.add_argument_group('Arguments')
g.add_argument('file', ………
args = p.parse_args()

Maybe adjust the documentation to match? As it stands, 
https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html is somewhat helpful, but 
https://docs.python.org/3/howto/argparse.html is totally confusing.

--

___
Python tracker 

___
___
Python-bugs-list mailing list
Unsubscribe: 
https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com

[issue46700] wrong nomenclature (options vs. arguments) in argparse

[Raymond Hettinger]

Raymond Hettinger  added the comment:

Éric is correct.  There is not much that can be done about this.  The 
nomenclature is deeply baked into the code and the docs.

We did change the help output to list "options" rather than "optional 
arguments".  That helps the end users so that "optional" doesn't imply the 
opposite of "required".

--
nosy: +rhettinger
resolution:  -> wont fix
stage:  -> resolved
status: open -> closed

___
Python tracker 

___
___
Python-bugs-list mailing list
Unsubscribe: 
https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com

[issue46700] wrong nomenclature (options vs. arguments) in argparse

[Éric Araujo]

Éric Araujo  added the comment:

I’m afraid this is a basic decision of argparse, and one of its reasons for 
existing as an rework of optparse.

--
nosy: +eric.araujo

___
Python tracker 

___
___
Python-bugs-list mailing list
Unsubscribe: 
https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com

[issue46700] wrong nomenclature (options vs. arguments) in argparse

[mirabilos]

New submission from mirabilos :

The argparse documentation and tutorial as well as its default option groups 
speak of "positional arguments" and "optional arguments". These are not used 
correctly, though.

Elements of the argument vector (past item #0) are distinguished as options and 
(positional) arguments.

Options are either flags (ls "-l", cmd "/c") or GNU long options ("--help"). 
They are usually optional ("[-h]") but may be mandatory (such as -o/-i/-p for 
cpio(1)). They may have option arguments (cpio(1) "-H format").

Arguments (also called positional arguments) may be mandatory ("file") or 
optional ("[file]"). They are also called operands (mostly in POSIX, not very 
common).

The argparse documentation confused the hell out of me at first because I only 
saw argument documentation and could not find option documentation…

--
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 412952
nosy: mirabilos
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: wrong nomenclature (options vs. arguments) in argparse
versions: Python 3.9

___
Python tracker 

___
___
Python-bugs-list mailing list
Unsubscribe: 
https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com