PTS 2019: Getopt::Long::Descriptive (2/5)

One non-PAUSE thing I worked on was Getopt::Long::Descriptive. I added a small new feature. It supports something like this:

describe_options(
  "%c %o ARG...",
  [ "foo",  "should we do foo?" ],
  [ "bar",  "should we do bar?" ],
  [ <<~'EOT' ],

    How should you know whether to use --foo and --bar?  Well, the choice
    is simple.  If you want to foo, use --foo, and if you want to use bar,
    don't, because --bar hasn't been implemented.
    EOT
);

This is okay, but when you run it, you get:

examine-program [long options...] ARG...
  --foo  should we do foo?
  --bar  should we do bar?
  How should you know whether to use --foo and --bar?  Well, the
  choice
is simple.  If you want to foo, use --foo, and if you
  want to use bar,
don't, because --bar hasn't been implemented.

Waaaa? Well, GLD is helpfully trying to word wrap and indent text for you, and it does a terrible job in the case of large hunks of text that you want displayed verbatim. I added a way to tell it to trust you, the author, on the indenting.

describe_options(
  "%c %o ARG...",
  [ "foo",  "should we do foo?" ],
  [ "bar",  "should we do bar?" ],
  [ \<<~'EOT' ],

    How should you know whether to use --foo and --bar?  Well, the choice
    is simple.  If you want to foo, use --foo, and if you want to use bar,
    don't, because --bar hasn't been implemented.
    EOT
);

Did you miss it? It’s the \ turning there heredoc string into a reference.

Of course, the code to implement this was nearly trivial. I spent more time on figuring out what was going on where than I did fixing it. I expect to start using this feature in other code more or less immediately.

Written on April 30, 2019