Comment by jooize
6 years ago
Strongly disagree. Be consistent, avoid ambiguity, reduce risk of uncertainty. The convention has the feature of combining flags, but there's more. Making -flag and --flag equivalent means combining flags is not possible without potential collisions, and the distinction would become less obvious overall. Usage in practice would be split between -flag and --flag. Enable such inconsistency for what benefits?
Yes, I agree… be consistent and avoid ambiguity. Combined short flags are the most ambiguous of all.
Usage in practice would be split between -flag and --flag… so what? They shouldn’t mean different things, because it is too easy for humans to miss the extra -. And in the end, CLIs are for humans first.
> And in the end, CLIs are for humans first.
I don't think that CLIs are more suited to either humans or computers. CLIs are flexible enough to be effectively used by both.
> Usage in practice would be split between -flag and --flag. So what?
Well, you're breaking everybody's expectations and many years of conventions by doing it. Saving one dash with every flag and losing the ability to combine short options is just not a good trade off.
> I don't think that CLIs are more suited to either humans or computers. CLIs are flexible enough to be effectively used by both.
Either a human is sitting at a terminal typing commands, or a human is sitting at a text editor writing a shell script, or a human is writing a program which runs other commands. In all cases, it's a bunch of strings pasted together and the computer can't typecheck it, so we need to make sure that the strings are readable by humans.
> Well, you're breaking everybody's expectations and many years of conventions by doing it. Saving one dash with every flag and losing the ability to combine short options is just not a good trade off.
If you've named your account on HN "gnubison", it's safe to say that you've got some biases. It might surprise you to know, then, that plenty of programs already don't let you combine short options, and that not everybody uses getopt_long or something compatible.
Combining short flags saves you a small amount of typing sometimes, but it adds extra confusion. So in general, I would say that most commands should not allow you to combine short flags.
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