2.1 Mmc arguments

Any useful invocation of mmc will specify one or more command line arguments. How the compiler treats each argument depends on its form.

• Any command line argument that starts with ‘-’ specifies one or more options.
• Any command line argument that starts with ‘@’ is a shorthand for a list of other arguments.
• Any command line argument that does not start with either ‘=’ or ‘@’ will be treated either as the argument of an option (if it immediately follows an option that takes an argument), or as a non-option argument (if it does not immediately follow an option that takes an argument).

In the absence of the --make option, whose description we will defer until Introduction to mmc --make, all non-option arguments should be either the name of a file, or the name of a module. The compiler assumes that non-option arguments ending in ‘.m’ are file names, while all other non-option arguments are module names. Both file names and module names tell the compiler what code it should operate on.