Command line inconsistencies & silent drops

[smangham]

When using the Grid configuration scripts, Grid uses the format --argument=value. However, when running Grid from the command line, it expects dimensions & MPI splits to be passed as --argument value. This inconsistency isn't really a major problem, except that if you do accidentally provide them to Grid as --argument=value they're silently ignored and the default values used.

This is just a bit of a pain. It would be better if either

• --argument=value was interpreted as --argument value

Or

• Invalid arguments were rejected and terminated the run

[paboyle]

Can't terminate on invalid arguments as the command line may still be parsed by the user application.
This is a common convention in libraries like MPI where argc and argv are passed to library, and they snarf and remove args.
However, I can think about extra parsing for "=", though of course the work in enhancing the parsing is significantly greater than the work on a user to not type in "=".