From: Tom Felker <tcfelker@...>
Date: 2003-04-07T06:35:52+09:00
Subject: Re: snippet:  modifications to GetoptLong to allow processing of	method arguments

On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 21:16, Albert Chou wrote:
> I don't know exactly how useful any of you out there will find the
> following, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.  The main
> modification is to allow the 'get' and 'each' methods to take an
> argument -- an array of strings akin to ARGV.  If this argument is
> present, it is processed by the Getoptlong object instead of ARGV.  If
> the argument is not present, ARGV is processed as in the original
> version.  I overrode the existing get method, copying it almost verbatim
> except for basically substituting the passed-in argument for ARGV
> everywhere.  The following code can be put in your code to gain the
> enhancement in behavior.
> 
> Why did I do this?  I had an existing program whose code was not
> encapsulated in a class, and I needed to do so in order to enable
> someone else to use this code.  I didn't want to lose the ability to
> flexibly process arbitrary arguments, so I decided to see how hard it
> would be to modify Getoptlong.  As it turns out, it was pretty easy.
> Within 90 minutes I had worked out all the little kinks (e.g., is it
> *args or args in my method definition?), resulting in a new version
> which was 100% compatible with existing clients' uses of the code and
> also cleanly usable as an object by new clients.
> 
> 
> Al

Wouldn't it make more sense to, since you've already s/ARGV/arguments/,
add a function use_args(array) to set what arguments points to?  You
could make initialize set arguments = ARGV, and if user code wanted to
parse a different array, it would cal use_args(differentArray).  It
might be more sane to only allow use_args before processing has started.

This way, it still wouldn't change client code, but you wouldn't have to
pass the array for each get.  I think the library should be like that in
the first place.

-- 
Tom Felker

It might look like I'm standing motionless, but I'm actively waiting for
my 
problems to go away.