Long options?

From: aronsson@lysator.liu.se
To: long-option-poll@gnu.ai.mit.edu

In gnu.announce R M Stallman wrote:

   `--' as a prefix,
   `-=' as a prefix,

* How easy is it to type each of these alternatives.

In the beginning was the UNIX and the UNIX spoke and said "Hello
world\n". Not did it say "Hello New Jersey\n", nor "Hello USA\n". But
it said "Hello world\n". For the joy of good computing is not for
USAmericans alone, but for the whole world to share. And the UNIX saw
that this was good.

And so says the holy manual, that a USAmerican keyboard layout has
minus and equals, both unshifted, on two keys next to each other. But
the book of internationalization of the holy manual says that so is
not the case in some other countries. For example, says the book of
internationalization, a Swedish keyboard has minus, unshifted, on the
key corresponding to USAmerican slash, while the equals, on the same
keyboard, is typed as a shifted digit zero.

Thus, teaches us the gospel, the sequence "-=" as a prefix for long
options would be very hard for Swedish computer users (and many others
world wide) to type.

* How error-prone are they.

Dunno.

* How esthetically clean are they.

Of course, the "long minus" ("--") is an ideal prefix for "long
options". I congratulate the inventor of this idea and hope it wins.
-- 
Lars Aronsson, Lysator computer club, Linkoping University, Sweden
     Aronsson@Lysator.LiU.SE    Voice phone at home +46-13-17 2143

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Updated: $Date: 2006/05/07 07:11:24 $ $Author: ramprasadb $