Today I am going to write my last console application. I am done with it. My fingers refuse to type (G-d forbid) any parsing code or import any more command-line parsers and/or frameworks.

No more baby seals slaughtered

I bet that vast majority of computer language tutorials or courses start with some sort of program that handles console input/output.
I have done my fair share of them at university using diverse languages: Pascal, C, Assembler, C++,… even LISP! For each one of those languages I wrote some clumsy, most likely buggy, command-line argument parsing. I was so focused on the problem in hand (and was such a mediocre programmer, now that we come to admit things) that I did not even have a personal utility or learnt to use a library for the purpose.
Hell, even when I decided to become a professional developer I have written some embarrassing parsing code for console programs.

Fortunately enough, as I became lazier and lazier (some people call it experience, some… don’t) I learnt that some people wrote libraries to help do something I was not very good at, and I started using some of them.
What follows is a sketch of my travel through some command line parsing libraries and the one I am ditching them all for.

Let’s Frame It, Shall We?

If I want to exemplify my evolution I have to establish a baseline. A common example that will be implemented using all the libraries, for the sake of comparison.

The example is as simple as examples should be:

• two commands “do something” and “do something else”, represented by the DoerOfSomething and DoerOfSomethingElse classes
• each command is dispatched depending on the proper command line argument
• each command takes its slightly different own parameter object: OptionsForSomething and OptionsForSomethingElse
• each parameter object is built according to the command line arguments passed
• parameter objects have a couple of simple and very common features: types that differ from string and a list argument
• each command writes a message to a provided TextWriter parameterized by the passed argument

Going Custom

I am too embarrassed to show snapshots of my buggy code (one can always head to Github and make fun of me). Nonetheless I bothered to split the dispatching part (execute one of the two commands) and the options parsing (“awesome” code inside ®).

This awful code shows the effort required to do simple things: show help, validate that we can execute a command, validate the creation of the options,…

Next?

Next time, we will be looking at code that can be really used for professional purposes using Mono.Options.

 

Last Console Series

1. The Beginning (this)
2. Mono.Options
3. NConsoler
4. ManyConsole
5. Powershell