This issue has already been raise in

http://bugs.python.org/issue9334
argparse does not accept options taking arguments beginning with dash (regression from optparse)

There I proposed leaving '_negative_number_matcher' unchanged, but only use it to set '_has_negative_number_optionals'.  Testing whether argument strings are numbers or not is better done with 'complex()'.


        if not self._has_negative_number_optionals:
            try:
                complex(arg_string)
                return None
            except ValueError:
                pass

That was my first patch, and I haven't looked at it much since then, other than testing that it is compatible with a number of other proposed patches.