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Comment by EE84M3i | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of crazy that we still don't have a standard computer readable way for a program to describe it's argument structure in a computer readable way that could be used for command line autocomplete. E.g. something like an extra section in the binary that describes how arguments are processed.

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http://docopt.org/

I think it would be probably easier to have a convention of programs to output their autocompletion options similar to how github.com/urfave/cli does.

https://github.com/urfave/cli/tree/master/autocomplete

There still needs to be some out of hand signal that it accepts that option otherwise you would pass it to tools that don't and cause undefined behavior.

Yea, like, imagine if posix pipes and command-line flags could be typed.

Powershell offers this I believe.

Yep. Not perfect... type systems have come a long way since PowerShell did it. But it's a good start.

Look at stuff like PowerShell secure strings for an example of the sort of neat stuff you can do.

NuShell is also attempting this. Both are cross platform.

https://github.com/nushell/nushell

Thanks for mentioning this! It looks super interesting, but I hadn't heard of it before.

That's right. I recently wrote on this topic: https://jmmv.dev/2020/10/powershell-cmdlet-params.html

The general problem is that typing for these sorts of systems suck. If it works it's a nice little safety feature, but when the types don't line up it's infuriating. Treating everything as a lowest common denominator makes compatibility trivial.

it's not that we don't have standard(s); it's the problem of adoption.

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