I got the message:

optparse.OptionError: invalid long option string '-T0': must start with
--, followed by non-dash

This is bad - the real error was that I gave a short option which did
not have a single letter.

Also, it seems that add_option('--height-of-plot','-h') is not allowed,
because -h can only go with --help. How do I override this?

Keith

No patch proposed yet, so retargetting to trunk.

Are these really bugs? The first message just reports the error the
other way around from how you view it: you are thinking of "-TO" as a
two-character "short option", optparse thinks of it as a two-character
long option which is missing a dash. I would side with optparse's
definition, since the point of short options is that they can be
combined under a single dash --- a multi-character option can't do that,
and so can't be "short" by definition.

In both this and the "-h" issue, optparse is reasonably enforcing a UI
convention as well as providing parsing facilities. That uniformity of
UI behaviour is a design goal is made explicit in the documentation.
Using optparse means that users can rely on "-h" to give them help
documentation, which IMO is a very useful convention to respect. And the
splitting of long and short options by whether they are single character
(and hence can be combined) or multi-character (hence uncombinable, but
good for less-used options without eating up the alphabetic option
namespace) is another nice convention which optparse enforces.

-1 from me: I think the existing behaviours are good, largely *because*
they aren't flexible.

• For the -h option, you may add "add_help_option=False" when creating
  the Optparse object

• concerning the error message: every parser that tries to give
  meaningful error messages has to guess what the user really meant. The
  exact text is really an implementation detail.