[ants_everywhere]

Are you saying this because you think the GNU standard is particularly well thought out, or because it's so common that deviations are confusing in general?

I'm so used to the GNU conventions that I'm not really aware of what the alternatives are or what their merits are.

[acmj]

The most important part is to have a standard, which doesn't need to be perfect. On argument parsing, I actually think the GNU way is the best so far. I have seen various deviations from GNU and I personally regard all of them inferior.

[gjvc]

GNU became the de-facto standard at least 20 years ago