> No, seriously. Take command line parsing. You want common syntax for options, right? And you want some of them to accept values, right? And those values can be strings, and booleans, and integers, right? And integers can be decimal or hexadecimal, right? And they can be values of user-defined types, right? And they can have help strings, right? And you’d like to generate help screens from them, right? And GUIs with property pages? And read them from configuration files? And check the legality of flags or sets of flags, right?
> Sure. It’s not a big deal. Trivial, even. (If you’re smart, everything is trivial until you fail completely due to exceeding complexity. And admit that you failed due to exceeding complexity. The former takes time to happen, the latter can never happen.)
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 18.9 ms ] thread> No, seriously. Take command line parsing. You want common syntax for options, right? And you want some of them to accept values, right? And those values can be strings, and booleans, and integers, right? And integers can be decimal or hexadecimal, right? And they can be values of user-defined types, right? And they can have help strings, right? And you’d like to generate help screens from them, right? And GUIs with property pages? And read them from configuration files? And check the legality of flags or sets of flags, right?
> Sure. It’s not a big deal. Trivial, even. (If you’re smart, everything is trivial until you fail completely due to exceeding complexity. And admit that you failed due to exceeding complexity. The former takes time to happen, the latter can never happen.)