Alter command line options to remove dollar signs

[DavidGriffith]

As I wrapped up version 6.12.4 of the Standard Library, I looked again at the list of accepted suggestions at http://inform-fiction.org/suggestions/accept.html. One of them has bothered me for a long time: The Inform6 compiler still makes use of dollar signs on the command line. To fix this, someone suggested and apparently Graham accepted the suggestion. Here it is:

20. The use of "$..." to introduce compiler options is intensely annoying on *NIX systems that use "$" as an environment variable indicator, e.g. $PATH -- it requires the constant use of quotes to avoid unpleasant and confusing results.

Is this something that can be considered again?

[erkyrath]

There's no suggestion there, just a complaint. :/(And I don't agree that it's "intensely annoying". It's mildly annoying. It's no worse than dealing with spaces in pathnames, which is not considered baroque these days.)

Anyhow. We can't deprecate the dollar-sign syntax without breaking old code, old build setups, and Inform 7.

We could consider adding an alternative syntax. Did you have one in mind?

[DavidGriffith]

I apologize for the poor choice of words.

I'm thinking of using --size small to supplement $small. Then --path ~/foo/bar, --include ~/foobar/include, --list. Working on the memory parameters.

[erkyrath]

I suppose --opt ALLOC_BLOCK_SIZE=8192 is the most Unixy way to do it.

[DavidGriffith]

I've switched things over to using a BSD-ish licensed getopt() and modified it to check for negation. The flags that begin with one dash work as do long options: (eg --include).

Still working on:

• Allowing for the old style of options preceded by dollar signs.
• Allowing for the old style of options preceded by plus signs.
• Processing a string from the Switches directive.
• Processing from an ICL (Inform Command Language) file.

[DavidKinder]

I'm not enthusiastic about wholesale replacing of the command line processor with getopt(): that has too many possibilities for introducing unexpected changes or breaking previously functional command lines.

[DavidGriffith]

I tried to modify the existing code to support --foobar style options, but kept having problems. What I've done so far is visible at https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/Inform6 in the flags_reform branch. This particular case match (https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/Inform6/-/blob/flags_reform/inform.c#L1557) is where I attempted to make the required changes. The problems I ran into were on the order of getting a hold of the entire string of --foobar. Ideas?

[erkyrath]

I took a quick look this weekend. I decided that the least invasive plan was to modify read_command_line() to check for --list, --size, and --opt and reformat those arguments before calling execute_icl_command().

I would not change any of the parsing in execute_icl_command(). So the new --opt format would not be legal in .icl files or !% comments -- only on the command line.

I haven't started on any of this, though.