Comment by gnubison

Perhaps short options are unreadable. But if I see a shell script that contains a long option with only one dash, I will definitely be confused... I don't think that saving a dash makes a shell script more readable. It definitely doesn't improve the situation enough to justify messing with people's preconceived ideas.

I don't even know what to say about your assumption that I'm biased because of my username. One might even claim that you're the narrow minded person to be judging people's biases based on three letters in their username.

Which programs don't allow you to combine short options? Other than perhaps hastily written shell scripts. getopt(3) is POSIX AFAIK so there's not really any excuse for POSIX programs to not handle combined short options.