Each toolset evolves in an ecosystem governed by rules and policies. As you point out, not everything that is technically possible meets all applicable rules and policies of the relevant ecosystem.

In the case of MSVC, when I say ecosystem, I am not just talking about the tiny C++ corner of the Windows platform.

-- Gaby

-----Original Message-----
From: Ville Voutilainen <ville.voutilainen_at_gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2023 12:03 AM
To: sg15_at_[hidden]
Cc: Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr_at_microsoft.com>; René Ferdinand Rivera Morell <grafikrobot_at_gmail.com>; Herb Sutter <hsutter_at_microsoft.com>
Subject: Re: [SG15] Meeting in Varna?

On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 18:13, René Ferdinand Rivera Morell via SG15
<sg15_at_[hidden]socpp.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 2:48 AM Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr_at_microsoft.com> wrote:
> >
> > [René]
> > > Since msvc understands that single initial dash. It also means it
> > > understands any double-dash option.
> >
> > No, it doesn't mean that.
>
> Can you elaborate on how it doesn't mean that cl.exe can handle double
> dash options easily? Is there something in the option parsing that
> prevents it, technical or other?

I don't think there's a technical difficulty, it's just inconsistent,
since MSVC doesn't do double-dash options
for anything else. So why not just change the "--std-info" to be
"-std-info" instead, the consistency problem for MSVC
goes away, and option parsers on other platforms grok that just fine,
they support long options with a single dash.