True; the perl solution does involve some "double book-keeping work" and other inconveniences, and it might be preferable to keep the argument parsing entirely in C using getopt() or other libraries like http://argtable.sourceforge.net/ Argument parsing involves parsing, perl is a good tool for parsing, and so I wanted to see what a perl based solution might look like. And I am not sure getopt() supports the features supported by Getopt::Declare.