*

since restricting ourselves to one character restricts us to 26 possible arguments, we will allow multiple character flags, the loss isn't too great, since there are not a lot of Boolean arguments

thus a flag consists of a prefix, either + or -, and one or more alphabetic characters

the value of an argument follows the flag, in the case of string values there must be a space between the flag and value, for numeric values this space isn't necessary, since digits can't appear in flags

we must also be able to handle arguments that don't have flags, these are typically file names that contain the input to the program

with this in mind, the following are examples of our argument syntax

*

*

*

*

prog -n 5 -f name
prog +f 3.2 -f name -n 5 input

March 1, 1999

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C201/TAM