The Amiga had a pretty cool feature where CLI argument parsing and help was provided via a library. This made things nicely consistent across almost all of the CLI tools.
Suddenly I'm reminded of how Windows represents the command line as a single string (PWSTR), and how entry points that expect argv-style are parsed by the CRT at startup.
vs. Unix where char *argv[] is what makes it to the syscall layer.
The result there is that command line processing is more consistent program-to-program on Unix. On Windows, every program could decide to tokenize the arguments differently.
I feel like there are a few interesting Microsoft phenomena that contrast with Unix thinking in both of these examples.
CommandLineToArgvW - You called that "WINAPI", but it's worth mentioning the more specific provenance of shlwapi.dll. This is not a core, foundational part of Windows that is used in core, foundational things. It's a helper function from the shell (explorer, not shell in the Unix sense). So, while it has a look and function that seems pretty foundational, it really isn't. It's there because somebody working on Explorer long ago found that useful to have and decided to export their helper function in the DLL.
CRT - A CRT binary ships with Windows, but really, that code is maintained and distributed by the compiler guys and DevDiv. So theoretically, the argv parser could change at those people's whim alongside a new Visual Studio release. And it seems from squinting at that github issue like that might have happened here.
So really ... there are more artifacts here attesting to the fact that the command line arg parser is not part of the operating system. People find that functionality useful, so they look for things that "look like" the operating system official method, and maybe they find stuff that does "look like it" -- but such a thing isn't really there.
I was not arguing that it was or was not part of the OS but just showing that the parsing being deferred to application code has produce two subtly incompatible implementations that differ for no reason other than that they do.
Yeah, I am not considering anything you say to be argumentative, I am just going in tangents with this topic because I have some experience there and find it interesting.
That's a good thing. You have to be careful using a command line SQL query when typing "SELECT ". If the processing is left to the program, an SQL app in Windows knows you didn't mean "" to mean all the files in the current folder.
There were also the Amiga style guides that were published with 2.0 that detailed how developers should build application user interfaces. The fragmentation in Linux/Unix distributions means that this kind of consistency is pretty much impossible, although FreeBSD does a much better job of being consistent than $majorlinuxdistros.
