This is an argument specification schema, designed to specify a verifiable contract with users of programs. It allows a programmer to specify clearly exactly how their program will interact with the system in a way which is easy to maintain.
It currently has two main purposes─these are as follows
- To allow documentation to be more easily generated (e.g.
man-pages without requiring knowledge of*roffsyntax) - To allow argument parsers to be generated from the specified data which adhere to the specification
These are detailed in the following sections.
JSON specifications which adhere to argspec, form a unified way of generating documentation on a variety of platforms.
Two currently supported are:
- Linux man pages (example: mangen)
- Web-based documentation (example ManualHTML)
Parser-generators which take argspec JSON specifications may be used to generate up-to-date, modular parsers for command-line arguments.
Known examples are:
A behaviour-specification for parsers produced from valid argspec parser generators can be found in behaviour.md