[I was away for a couple weeks shortly after sending the message below so I didn't push very hard at the time, but now that I'm back I figured I'd try to revive this discussion.] To try to reset the context, I and others want the ability to stop argument parsing at the first positional argument, so that it's possible to write a program with a syntax like xargs/valgrind/many other tools. The ideal would be to have an 'allow_interspersed' style option which would be set by default (to give the now-usual behavior of "cmd arg --opt" being the same as "cmd --opt arg") but which a client program could unset if they wanted the xargs-like behavior. However, I don't see how to do this, because
If someone says style_t style = allow_short | allow_slash_for_short I can't automatically go and set allow_interspersed for them as well.
And so without some ugly and not-worth-it coding tricks (changing style_t to a class), unless I'm missing something you can't pick this ideal without breaking backwards compatibility. So I instead suggested a new 'disallow_interspersed' style option, which would be off by default (keeping backwards compatibility) but you could set it to get xargs-like behavior, but this is inconsistent with all the other style flags which are allow_xxx. So what do you want to do regarding this issue? References: Trac issue: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/6991 (includes a patch for both of those options) The previous messages in this discussion: http://lists.boost.org/boost-users/2012/07/75100.php Evan