Paper Info
Title
CLOPS: A DSL for Command Line Options
Abstract
Programmers often write custom parsers for the command line input of their programs. They do so, in part, because they believe that both their program's parameterization and their option formats are simple. But as the program evolves, so does the parameterization and the available options. Gradually, option parsing, data structure complexity, and maintenance of related program documentation becomes unwieldy. This article introduces a novel DSL called CLOPS that lets a programmer specify command line options and their complex inter-dependencies in a declarative fashion. The DSL is supported by a tool that generates the following features to support command line option processing: (1) data structures to represent option values, (2) a command line parser that performs validity checks, and (3) command line documentation. We have exercised CLOPS by specifying the options of a small set of programs like ls , gzip , and svn which have complex command line interfaces. These examples are provided with the Open Source release of the CLOPS system.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1007/978-3-642-03034-5_10
DSL
Keywords
Field
DocType
complex command line interface,option format,command line parser,available option,command line documentation,command line options,command line option processing,command line input,command line option,option value,option parsing,data structure,dsl
Data structure,Programming language,Programmer,Digital subscriber line,Computer science,Program documentation,Software product line,Parsing,Documentation
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
5658
0302-9743
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
5
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mikoláš Janota146824.29
Fintan Fairmichael2282.84
Viliam Holub3495.38
Radu Grigore41259.83
Julien Charles5311.84
Dermot Cochran6292.57
Joseph R. Kiniry768840.03