[Haskell-cafe] Typed Configuration Files

[Ketil Malde]

Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org> writes:

> Seriously, cmdargs is *brilliant*.  It's also magic (to me).

On this list, I'm uncertain whether "brilliant" is a warning or a
recommendation, but "magic" is clearly irresistible, so I had a go at
using cmdargs. 

And I agree, it is really nice in quickly and succintly getting command
parsing up and working, and in that it most Works As Expected (tm).
Some snags I ran into, which may (or may not) serve to improve
documentation, and which may (or may not) result in some gentle guidande
as to preferred solutions rising to the surface: 

- The examples use 'def' a lot, and I mistakenly thought 'empty' would
  supply default values. Not so, replace 'def' with the default value
  and off you go.  'def' seems to be the "minimum" value for that
  particular type.

- As I wanted a single file argument, I tried to use 'args' in
  combination with a parameter of type FilePath.  Apparently 'args'
  wants [FilePath] and appends command line arguments to the default
  value.  I used 'error "no file bla bla"' as the default value, and 
  appending to this didn't do much good, as you can imagine.  So: use
  [FilePath] and check the length manually.

- CmdArgs helpfully provides default --help, --version as well as
  --quite and --verbose.  For the two former, there's also a nice
  default implementation, but presumably the latter two are for use in
  the program proper.  Unfortunately, I don't know how to get at their
  values.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants