[jstimpfle]

Yeah, every programmer at one point has to make her own argument parsing library. Nope, there is no one syntax that fits all use cases.

While there are thousands of ways programs can parse arguments (and that's great!) there is only one argument passing mechanism in Unix (plus environment variables for implicit static things and file descriptors for streams).

Unix doesn't care how you parse your arguments, and that's why it is lean, and why it has been successful as a development platform.

Donald Knuth: "I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof."