4.4 Option Retrieval

During the runtime phase of Clon, your main activity will be to retrieve options and their values. Clon provides two techniques for retrieving options: you can request the value for a specific option directly, or you can process the command-line sequentially, which is the more traditional approach.

Both of these techniques can be freely combined together at any time, because Clon keeps track of the current status of the command-line. In fact, Clon never works on the original command-line, but uses a mutable copy of it after parsing. If you want to access the real command-line of your application (except for the compiler-specific options, see Delivering Scripts), you may use the cmdline function, which is a wrapper around an implementation-dependent way to access it.

Finally, remember that the command-line is scanned from left to right during option retrieval (see Option Retrieval in The Clon End-User Manual).