I think what you're looking for is the parse_args() method, which returns a pair; one part is the named option values, the other part is everything that's left. So you handle positional arguments by iterating over the "what's left" part.

Nope. I still need to

# Check which arguments are available

# Cast them

# Provide utilization information for the arguments

# Provide defaults

# Do all the other stuff that optparse does for options

Hmm... I guess Google's argparse really is the future.