Description
===========

A radical departure fro Unix - proper command line parsing!

This is a library to replace getopt() or simple "-" option processing by a program.
It provies automatic scanning switch options, + to turn on, - to turn off; string
valued options, e.g. file=../fred, and numeric options - these may be in any base
between 2 and 36 or autobase, which follows the C convention for constants. Multiple
numeric value options are also parsed, e.g. tabs=4,7,23, and return as a vector the
first element being the number of values found. As well as parsing options the library
provides for displaying a table of options on request. Run the demo program - which is
the only "proper" documentation (sorry, but I've never got around to it).

Installation
============

Run make. Copy cset.a & cset.h to suitable directories.

History
=======

Many years ago I used a Honeywell GCOS/TSS system and the B language from the University of
Waterloo, Ontario. The B language came with a command line parser library, bset(). I extended
that library, adding options to print the argument table etc. and standardised all the commands
on the TSS system (plus some other major hacking, but enough said...). Later I rewrote the whole
library from scratch in C for Unix.

Acknowlegements
===============

To the people at Waterloo for the original idea.
To by boss at the time - which is the reason for the detailed copyright notice
[We had an offical agreement, anything I wrote and distributed could either be
sold at a price set by him with me getting a percentage, or if I disagreed with
his proposed price I could overrule and distribe it free...]

If anybody writes some proper manual pages, please send me a copy!

Nigel Perry
Dept of Computing
Imperial College
London SW7
England

np@uk.ac.ic.doc
