Eh, they are just more command line arguments, ones that go on the left side of the command instead of the right. I guess an alternative is something the Windows registry, but I'm not seeing that as a great improvement since it's less direct.
Command-line arguments aren't passed to subprocesseses, can't be inspected by arbitrary functions in the same process, and don't leak memory if they are changed.
> can't be inspected by arbitrary functions in the same process
You can not really rely on that. The initial stack layout is well-defined at least on linux, so digging up argv is not difficult. Or just open /proc/self/cmdline
Yes, I'm just highlighting that it's just as convenient to change them as command line parameters on a per-invocation basis. If there is a proposal for something else, it should retain this capability. Config files and something like the windows registry are much less convenient.
