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[Scott Lawrence <bytbox@xxxxxxxxx>]

I think I mentioned this already... what do you people think?

I propose that programs not be executed in the normal, direct fashion.
 Consequently, programs don't ever parse strings of options (forget
legacy POSIX compliance issues - that's easily circumvented in 3 ways
(2 good, 1 so-so) I can think of off the top of my head, I'm sure
there are more). Instead, they specify in a more data-based form of
'options', and then they can optionally specify, in essence, which
options should be 'short' and how they should be 'short'.  The shell
itself takes care of what to do with this information.

Justification: makes various kinds of scripting easier, saves programs
from the pain of parsing options (mostly), makes shells more
customizable, might make stuff easier (tab-completion could be done
much more nicely).

Drawbacks: depending on how we implement it, it could be less unix-y
and rather ugly.  Might also cause compatibility issues with existing
programs that have weird option formats, like gcc, so we'd have to
have a lot of hacks in the legacy libraries.

-- 
Scott Lawrence

Webmaster
The Blair Robot Project
Montgomery Blair High School