Re: A not quite stylish proposal for command line processing

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     The problem is that the equivalent (pop command-line-args-left) is the
>     only way to pass strings from the shell or elsewhere without having to
>     requote them as Lisp strings.  (*argv++) might be quite over the top,
>     but at least (pop argv) would still be quite concise, much more
>     Lispish, and it might make it easier for people to actually find the
>     respective variable.
>
> It is a fine method of doing this.  If people really want to do this,
> then let's install some such thing.
>
> However, I am not sure that the name `argv' is useful now
> that even most hackers are not C programmers.  Does any other
> language use the name `argv'?

Perl has @ARGV, awk has ARGV, Python has sys.argv, bash has $@ (well,
you can't always win), Ruby has ARGV, lua has arg, Java has args[]...

The v in argv has not survived into all script languages (though quite
better than argc), but it makes the variable name safer against
accidental reuse in our flat Lisp namespace.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum