Re: Local Versus Global Command Options

On 2025-02-19 21:53:17 +0000, Dan Cross said:

Be that as it may, the person you are responding to, and that you regularly interact with at length, has shown repeatedly that he is not acting in good faith.
 Technical answers to technical questions, and even spirited debates with vigorous disagreement, are all well and good as long as all parties are at least attempting to honor a collegial spirit of cooperation.  But in this case, as with most cases involving Lawrence, the base conditions in which to have the discussion are simply not met.
 This is the sort of thing that ought to be in an FAQ.

Is it feasible for DCL?  Sure. Though it'll likely involve passing some of the syntax to lib$table_parse or ilk for parsing, as do a few DCL commands I've encountered (or have written) over the years.  Or can go directly to lib$table_parse for the rest of the command, for that matter.
There've also been a few discussions about providing getopt_long()-like support with DCL parsing "underneath" the classic C parsing, and work to overhaul the DCL CLD APIs, but the results of that design and development effort never seemed compelling.
There are commands around that have four or more interfaces, too: getopt() or getopt_long() foreign command, SET COMMAND and DCL invocation, RUN with prompting, and callable API. Adding a DCL parsing loop inside the app is feasible, too. (There's at least one in OpenVMS itself with the first four.)
The whole area of command parsing, command options and syntax, saving and maintaining app-related preferences data storage and management, and related details within OpenVMS are all disjoint and ad-hoc at best, and as has been discussed before.
The size of the audience for DCL command syntax for FFmpeg is also approximately zero. A similar discussion and realization arose with the IP network diagnostic tool command syntax. The folks using those tools expected the syntax they expected, while very few sought  out the DCL syntax.
To Dan's point quoted above: Will the OP learn anything from this thread? Probably not. That seems about as likely as re-hosting OpenVMS onto the Linux kernel, as the OP had repeatedly proposed.
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