Or were you referring to older utilities/actual unix times?

[0] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=getopt_long&sektio... [1] I mean, there's oddities such as openssl(1) but those seem a minority on every platform

Go's 'flag' package -- although double-dash is silently accepted on the command line.

The deeper issue with 'flag' is that it rejects the BSD convention of a short/long option pair having guaranteed equivalent semantics e.g. -h/--help. The library just won't let the programmer create such a pair by means of its standard functions.

Which uses the Plan 9 convention; the system the Go creators were exposed to. A good example of competing conventions of the past rearing itself in modern tools.

Maybe, but I find it more likely that they just copied math notation. In mathematics (broadly, not just theoretical CS, also analysis), the type of something is indicated with an infix `:`, like `f : A -> B` is a function from A to B. This colon conventionally has equal spacing on both sides, like a regular infix operator.

There's the "Thing of int" weirdness also

And then there's grep

But the infamy is not that it used -v for something other than “version”—I doubt that convention existed in 1983, when the complaint was made—but rather that it was a sign of the ever‐growing complexity of specific Unix tools at the expense of the harmony of the whole system.

See “Program design in the UNIX environment,” by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan, USENIX 1983: http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/

Uppercase switches also strikes me as not very intuitive, either you need to look at the help page or you have to have the same mindset as the developer.

And still, the distinction between lowercase and uppercase switches are not easy to remember.

For the power user though it makes sense.