Eric:
I agree, that would be the obvious workaround. However, it turns that the way dest is set differs for optional and positional arguments. I alluded to this in my earlier message http://bugs.python.org/issue15125#msg163456

Specifically, it turns out that when the first argument to add_argument() starts with '-', it is interpreted as an optional argument and dest in _inferred_ from the first argument (eg, by stripping leading '-', and replacing remaining '-' with '_'). So supplying dest= to add_argument() overrides this heuristic.

But when the first argument to add_argument() does not start with a '-', dest becomes exactly the first argument, and supplying dest as a keyword argument like you suggest yields the exception I reported earlier.

Revisiting the documentation on dest (http://docs.python.org/dev/library/argparse.html#dest), this behavior is briefly and un-enlighteningly addressed in the first paragraph. The problem is that the paragraph suggests that dest can be explicitly set using keyword argument even for positional arguments; instead a ValueError is thrown as I have already mentioned.

I suppose that patching argparse to replace '-' with '_' for positional arguments may break existing code for anyone that has figured out they can get hyphenated positional arguments with getattr(), which would make it a risky patch. But patching the module to allow explicitly setting dest via keyword argument shouldn't hurt anybody.

For clarity, I recommend adding """(This conversion does NOT take place for positional arguments.)""" before the last sentence of paragraph 2 in the dest documentation.

Since I had no idea about using getattr, I bet others wouldn't figure it out either. I suggest also adding a simple example in the documentation for anybody that wants to use an invalid Python identifier as an argument. (Please don't say this is an invalid use case because eg, ssh has options -1, -2, -4, and -6.)