GetOpt formatting improvements

[Aaron Denney]

On 2008-07-02, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
>>  > I think thats a really bad idea. We want options that work and do the
>>  > sensible thing. When would a user want to set these options to
>>  > different values? Without a use case, and a potential user, these
>>  > extra variants are a waste of hard-drive space.
>>
>> I thought the use case I had in mind was apparent from the context: finding
>>  out the terminal width and then setting the wrap-width accordingly. And the
>>  max. description indentation could be set as a percentage of the terminal
>>  width. This is all quite similar to what pretty printing libs allow.
>
> I'd suggest a much better idea would be to have one function which did
> all this, in the IO Monad. Some sort of
> showTheGetOptHelpWithTheRightWidth :: IO (). Before adding a function
> I think its important to ask "what will this function be used for" -
> if there are no particularly good answers, then its best not to add
> it. If it happens to be a general case of something where everyone
> will want a specific case then the specific case seems more appealing.

Everyone?  No one will want to ever put it into a gui widget with a
a width that's not 80?  Composability and flexibility are cheap in this
case.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-