Yeah, so what happens when you have an option with a '-' in it that isn't valid as a variable name (I know what happens). It's just stupid.

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coldtea 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The same thing you'd do yoursef if you wanted to assign it to a namesake local variable even if it was in a dict to begin with: you'd make the dash an underscore.

	▲	commandersaki 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It would be extremely unlikely that you would replicate the name as a local variable if it was in a dict, but regardless a dict doesn't have that limitation. The namespace thing is atrocious and bad design -- no straightforward way to iterate over them, merging/updating them is awful, collides with keyword methods (keys, items, etc.), and so on; thankfully more modern argument parsing libraries didn't repeat this mistake. It's just a shame this ended up in the standard library, but then Python standard library has never really been any good, e.g. logging and urllib1234567.