> I believe that the behavior is so deeply ingrained in how argparse
> works that it can't be changed.

I think so as well.  Handling arguments with a dash prefiew could be viewed as fundamental design flaw except for the fact that the module has been so successful (both before and after landing in the standard library).

I've come to believe that argparse is very difficult to change without risk of breaking many existing tools that depend on argparse working exactly the way it does now.

Also, this issue is over a decade old and no clear solution has emerged.


> at this point installing modules from PyPI is sufficiently easy
> that I'm not sure it makes sense to advocate for another command
> line parser in the stdlib.

I agree. It would be a hard sell at this point.

Let's close this one.  I don't think it is going to get solved.