Trollop 1.16.2 has been out for a while now, but I realized I (heavens!) haven’t yet blogged about it.

Exciting features include:

1. Scientific notation is now supported for floating-point arguments, thanks to Will Fitzgerald.
2. Hoe dependency dropped. Finally.
3. Some refactoring of the standard exception-handling logic, making it easier to customize Trollop’s behavior. For example, check this out:

opts = Trollop::with_standard_exception_handling p do
  p.parse ARGV
  raise Trollop::HelpNeeded if ARGV.empty? # show help screen
end

This example shows the help screen if there are no arguments. Previous to 1.16, this was difficult to do, since the standard exception-handling was baked into Trollop::options. The help message would automatically be displayed if -h was given, but programmatically invoking it on demand was difficult.

So I’ve refactored the standard exception handling into with_standard_exception_handling, and if you want fine-grained control, instead of calling Trollop::options, you now have the option to call Trollop#parse from within with_standard_exception_handling.

You don’t really need any of this stuff, of course, unless you’re really picky about how your exception-handling works. But hey, that’s why I wrote Trollop in the first place….