Comment author: @protz

Hi,

First of all, thanks for the patch. However, that looks like quite the hack! Thus, I'm afraid we cannot integrate this patch as-is.

The right way to do this would be to change signature of parse from

val parse :
(key * spec * doc) list -> anon_fun -> usage_msg -> unit

to

val parse :
(key * spec * doc * documented) list -> anon_fun -> usage_msg -> unit

type documented = bool

However, this would break backwards compatibility. What you can do instead is add an optional unit argument to the parse function and others, that tells whether arguments with no documentation should be printed out.

Thinking about it, that sounds very ad-hoc, and I tend to think you'd be better off keeping a private (tweaked) copy of arg.ml in your source tree...

Comment author: @gasche

Maybe the following function could be added:
val parse_rich : (key * spec * rich_doc) -> anon_fun -> usage_msg -> unit
where rich_doc is an abstract type¹ with
val doc : string -> rich_doc
val undocumented : rich_doc

¹: not having "doc" abstract in the first place is what makes it difficult to enrich the behavior now without breaking compatibility.

Comment author: @protz

Right, but there's a whole lot of functions that take triples (key * spec * doc), are you implying that we should provide an alternative version for each one of them? I can see people asking for more if we were to implement just one...

Comment author: @protz

After discussing this with others, this has been fixed in svn revision r11939.

To have an option not included in the usage string, just put an empty string for its documentation.

Comment author: @johnwhitington

Thanks for this, but the patch isn't right: it conflicts with the padding of help strings. You need to also do:

--- trunk/stdlib/arg.ml 2011-12-22 19:03:46.000000000 +0000
+++ arg.ml 2011-12-23 11:40:17.000000000 +0000
@@ -238,6 +238,7 @@

let add_padding len ksd =
match ksd with

• | (_, _, "") -> ksd (* Do not pad undocumented ones. *)
  | (kwd, (Symbol (l, _) as spec), msg) ->
  let cutcol = second_word msg in
  let spaces = String.make (len - cutcol + 3) ' ' in

Comment author: @protz

Good catch! I'd never used [align] before so I didn't think of it.

svn r11946