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Comment by gkfasdfasdf | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that thought this was a universal format for describing CLI arguments?

I've long wished I could "declare" my CLI arguments in a Markdown-like syntax (e.g. using `[]` and `<>` to denote optional vs. required arguments) and have some library figure it all out for me.

You're in for a treat: that library already exists and has been ported to multiple programming languages:

http://docopt.org

Wow thanks, that does look interesting!

Doesn't look like it's maintained anymore, sadly. All of the major language repos have long threads trying to figure out who can pick up maintenance of the project.

https://docopt.org/ may be of interest.

PowerShell does exactly that for its scripts.

And then uses those definitions for autocomplete, validation, etc.

I had a go at this a while ago, uses the markdown AST to build a program descriptor:

https://github.com/mkdoc/mkcli

I think docopt is a better choice as it has more traction but this experiment showed me a pure markdown implementation is feasible.

Neat!

> I think docopt is a better choice as it has more traction

Is docopt still being maintained/developed? As another comment indirectly mentions: the original python repo seems abandoned. The other language ports still have more recent updates though.

Consider protobufs, you have to do a bit more work but if you're going to schematize an API (which a CLI is when you get down to it) it's a good universal option.

How would that work exactly? So args resolve into a protobuf struct? But how are human readable args parsed into a protobuf?

I go the other way: use optparse-applicative[1] to generate argument parsers for the configs, and generate help commands for each (sub)commands from each parser.

[1]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/optparse-applicative

I’ve never seen “argumentation” used in that context.

No, but the "arg" in "argdown" is close enough to the typical abbreviation of CLI arguments that it isn't that much of a stretch to imagine someone being primed that way to misread that word.

No, I clicked through and got confused, came here for enlightenment. Thanks!

I certainly thought that.

I figured the same.

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