It sounds like they didn't need (at the time) to separate arguments from options, but they did need to separate revisions from pathspecs. So they repurposed "--" as the most familiar separator.
Probably they were trying to use familiar conventions, but when they later needed to separate arguments from options, that was a closer match for what other people were using "--" for, but it was too late.
The first release of git was in 2005, and Torvalds' Linux was clearly UNIX-inspired, so it's not like this was due to considerations for some other OS like DOS/Windows.
It's only charged if you are a white upper middle class american. The rest of the world understands the difference between a term used in a software version control tool and slavery. The rest of the world also does not change a word on git while simultaneously fostering extremist far right views.
The whole thing makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
As with almost any successful system: more and more special features and edge cases get added. Git has become ridiculously complex.
I wonder: would it not be better to tell users with those edge cases to fix their problems some other way? To take an example from the article: why does someone have a filename beginning with a dash? Maybe don't do that.
Sometimes you're using git in a context where you don't control the filenames, or where a potential attacker could influence or fully control them, at which point edge cases like this can easily turn into exploits.
I also chafe whenever I run into artificial restrictions on things like characters in names of things, because there's no good reason for them besides the laziness of developers or the limitations and inertia of existing systems that might be used under the hood, like DNS for instance.
Argh, that's when I wished for object oriented shells. Powershell sure isn't perfect but objects encoding their own meaning really helps differentiate those cases (but it may not always help the user if types aren't clear to the reader)
Hmm, not sure I understand. How are those shell based?
I agree that rust and haskell are not your typical OO (or not OO at all in a traditional sense) I guess my poorly worded claim was less focused on the OO nature of psh than on the typization (which both of these also do) - if you knew what type $rev and $path are, it's easier to distinguish intent, whether objects or not.
Of course, Rust and Haskell aren't typically thought of as shells. Though if you wanted to and felt brave enough, you could use ghci as a shell.
> I guess my poorly worded claim was less focused on the OO nature of psh than on the typization (which both of these also do) - if you knew what type $rev and $path are, it's easier to distinguish intent, whether objects or not.
It is an en dash, not an em dash, since it's about as wide as an n.
Some software substitutes a double hyphen -- with an en dash rather than em, and use the triple hyphen --- for the em dash. Perhaps Hacker News' title formatter is one of them.
Okay, edit submitted, but that is extra weird, because the double hyphen is a convention or placeholder for an emdash. When a transformation takes place, it becomes an emdash.
There is no reason to transform it to an endash. I don't know any software that would do that. Checked with an LLM, too. That makes no sense at all!
TeX uses -- (double hyphen) for producing an en dash and --- (triple hyphen) for an em dash, and that's pretty darn longstanding and well-established. And FWIW, the English writing conventions that I learned use em dashes as punctuation without an adjoining space—like this—but allow en dashes surrounded by spaces as an alternative – like this – so I frequently see spaced double hyphen used as the ASCII equivalent of dash punctuation and interpret it as the latter. I've never personally heard of double hyphen for em specifically, only either as en specifically or as a sort of ambiguous whatever-dash.
Then how do you type in an en dash instead? Also, according to LLMs, the en dash is used in far more languages than the em dash. Many languages don't use the em dash at all. Using the em dash for sentence interruptions seems to be specifically an US American English tradition: Most languages which use dashes for sentence interruptions use spaced en dashes instead.
From the title I've learned that git uses an em-dash instead of double dash as options delimiter. Thanks for pointing out that the title was wrong -- I've never had a need to use -- with git, so didn't know that it doesn't work.
Copilot CLI (we get that at work) often uses slightly low-level and cryptic git commands. Never noticed that it would use --end-of-options though.
Should check what it does with branch names starting with a dash.
Of course that wouldn't be a security vulnerability, but a user error. It asks user approvals to execute those things and has disclaimers to check results. Which of course every user does all the time... /s
Remembering app-specific one-offs is kind of the worst!
Probably they were trying to use familiar conventions, but when they later needed to separate arguments from options, that was a closer match for what other people were using "--" for, but it was too late.
https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/
The first release of git was in 2005, and Torvalds' Linux was clearly UNIX-inspired, so it's not like this was due to considerations for some other OS like DOS/Windows.
Now we can all run important CLI programs like Zork without a 'command doesn't exist' to command ratio of 1:4
The whole thing makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Don't see that we get rid of either command lines in text or von Neumann any time soon.
I wonder: would it not be better to tell users with those edge cases to fix their problems some other way? To take an example from the article: why does someone have a filename beginning with a dash? Maybe don't do that.
I also chafe whenever I run into artificial restrictions on things like characters in names of things, because there's no good reason for them besides the laziness of developers or the limitations and inertia of existing systems that might be used under the hood, like DNS for instance.
Argh, that's when I wished for object oriented shells. Powershell sure isn't perfect but objects encoding their own meaning really helps differentiate those cases (but it may not always help the user if types aren't clear to the reader)
It's like passing a struct to a function instead of a badly serialized representation of a value
I agree that rust and haskell are not your typical OO (or not OO at all in a traditional sense) I guess my poorly worded claim was less focused on the OO nature of psh than on the typization (which both of these also do) - if you knew what type $rev and $path are, it's easier to distinguish intent, whether objects or not.
A shell is just a programming language that's well suited for interactive repl use. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsh
Of course, Rust and Haskell aren't typically thought of as shells. Though if you wanted to and felt brave enough, you could use ghci as a shell.
> I guess my poorly worded claim was less focused on the OO nature of psh than on the typization (which both of these also do) - if you knew what type $rev and $path are, it's easier to distinguish intent, whether objects or not.
Agreed!
By the way, something munched the article title. An endash is incorrect command-line usage. It’s supposed to be a double hyphen.
Some software substitutes a double hyphen -- with an en dash rather than em, and use the triple hyphen --- for the em dash. Perhaps Hacker News' title formatter is one of them.
There is no reason to transform it to an endash. I don't know any software that would do that. Checked with an LLM, too. That makes no sense at all!
Should check what it does with branch names starting with a dash.
Of course that wouldn't be a security vulnerability, but a user error. It asks user approvals to execute those things and has disclaimers to check results. Which of course every user does all the time... /s