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Native argument parsing

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
cli, compilers

Research direction

No source files or tests are named. Start by reading the docopt-style example and the proposed lj docstring invocation, then define the language and CLI behavior needed for both built-in argument parsing and docstring generation. Done requires an agreed design covering syntax, generated values, imports or configuration, and the command-line workflow.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement proposal

Argument parsing is so common that it should be built into the language. For example Docopt Strings should be automatically recognized. This should not require imports or configuration in the code by the user. They should be responsible for the docstring and that is all. Remembering the syntax and symantics of docstring itself can also be tedious. LJ should provide a command line tool that aids in generating this string.

Examples

"""
Hello, world!

Usage:
  hello_world <author>
  hello_world -h | --help
  hello_world --version

Options:
  -h --help     Show this screen.
  --version     Show version.
"""

main() {
    printf("Hello, world!, from %s", author)
}

This example uses multi line comment syntax similar to docstrings in python. This is just for the purpose of the example. This example also demonstrates the author variable being in scope due to the docstring. This is also just for the purpose of the example. We may want to explore having an implicit arg map or similar.

$ lj docstring --name "Hello,world!" hello_world <author>
$ ... #print docstring shown in previous example

This cli would need to be easy enough to use that a user wouldn't need to google docopt everytime they need to do some argument parsing.

Dominant language
Java
Stars
6
Forks
7
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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