Ooh, I didn't know you could *nest* 'em! ChatGPT never told me that! Now we're g...

psd1 · on Sept 22, 2023

It blows my mind how big a deal argument parsing is in legacy scripting languages (including python).

That snippet is concise, but relies on the user supplying arguments in the order you demand. AFAICS, non-trivial scripts require you to loop over arguments, testing against long and short forms of parameters, and shifting if the parameter expects an argument.

In Powershell, you define your parameter and apply constraints. Voila:

    [Parameter(Mandatory)]
    [ValidateRange(1, 20)]
    [int]$foo

That's it, the entire thing, done.

keepamovin · on Sept 22, 2023

Thanks for that. I'm currently migrating a set of bash scripts to PS1 for win compatibility. This is gonna help me! Undeniably a good feature. Sure there's the case / getopts idiom for parsing args in bash as you say, but I'd say this is a place PS excels them in. I totally agree that arg parsing should be standardized and simple like this. A nice CLI is just such a joy to use. Ideally something that includes usage info and (like the PS example seemingly) optionality.

Syntactically I'd even prefer a single line, like

  [Pram(musthave):In(1, 20)/"Foos excessive or inadequate":int/$foo:"Foo count"/"Please supply how many foos you want."]

blueflow · on Sept 22, 2023

If you call python a legacy scripting language, i'll call Windows (where powershell runs on) a legacy operating system.

geocrasher · on Sept 22, 2023

Sure, Windows doesn't have "legacy" like VMS or Unix etc, but it's been in use by every day people longer than any other current OS except for MacOS, which really isn't the same OS it launched as, whereas Windows has maintained backwards compatibility (for better for for worse) for decades. So.. Legacy? Why not.

keepamovin · on Sept 23, 2023

This is the most civilized flame war I have ever seen. :)

psd1 · on Sept 23, 2023

I didn't mean to describe python as "legacy"; it is a great choice for scripting in the year 2023. It's second only to pwsh for that.

I use pwsh on Linux every day.

Anything that isn't a lisp machine is a legacy OS ;-)

I realise I've given offense, for which I'm sorry, but I'm driven not so much to denigrate bash as to advocate for a world where shells are semantic.