It's useful to see and example or two detailing how a program should be 
invoked and the expected results.

I'd like to add the "example" keyword which will be printed below the 
"options:" when the usage is displayed.  It would not be formatted like 
the "description" string.

Looking at the source, there's the undocumented "epilog" keyword, but it, 
unfortunately is automatically pushed through the formatter, which would 
not be desirable for the output.

This seems like a reasonable request.

I found this bug while looking for suggestions how to add examples to
the optparse help call, but I feel there is a better and more general
solution - just provide some minimal formatting for description: treat
empty line as paragraph separator. Then I would be able to add example
or anything else to the description formatting it as necessary

> but I feel there is a better and more general
> solution - just provide some minimal formatting for description: treat
> empty line as paragraph separator. Then I would be able to add example
> or anything else to the description formatting it as necessary

Agreed.  I have also been bitten by optparse munging paragraphs together
in the description, and it's annoying.  I *think* we could get away with
two simple rules:

  * blank lines separate paragraphs
  * indented lines don't get wrapped

Obviously no one wants to reinvent reStructuredText, but I think that
should do the trick.

If that works, I think the suggested 'examples' arg becomes unnecessary.

This may be interesting for argparse too.

With argparse, you can specify formatter_class= RawDescriptionHelpFormatter and then format things however you want in the description.

http://docs.python.org/dev/library/argparse.html#formatter-class

So I think there's no need for this in argparse.

The two principals on the two argument parsing modules both find this unnecessary.

I understood Greg’s reply to mean that there was no need for an examples keyword if simple paragraph splitting was added.

> I understood Greg’s reply to mean that there was no need for an examples 
> keyword if simple paragraph splitting was added.

Right, but optparse has been superseded by argparse.  So my opinion is even less important than it was before 2.7.