Wel it does, and this is why I needed it. For me it added two very important things:
1) it adds the possibility to create a descendant of the telnet class which can handle the options. Without this, the callback mechanism must always be handled externaly to the telnet object itself.

2) And since the callback has no concept of self (missing parameters) it adds the possibility to have more than one instance of the telnet class which did not need a different version of the callback function each time.
I needed about 6 instances (one for each system I had to reach), so had to provide 6 _different_ callback functions. (This showed to me that the callback way of doing was totally broken)

I wanted to (and did) encapsulate the telnet object with something which itself could provide the knowlege of handling some of the options (in fact a telnet 3270, which is a special case of the telnet protocol). This would have been very much harder to do without being able to handle the options within the objet.

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

Ernest.