I think you may misunderstand - the idea is "in addition to", not "instead of" the usual syntax, `a=123 b=456 mycmd arg1 arg2 arg3 ..`, but it happens to provide a way to give "long names".

Also, it did catch on in the sense of being available, if not well known as much as POSIX (BSDs) /Bash (Linux) / Zsh (Mac OSX) caught on.

The spacing is as confusing or not as any Unix shell quoting, as in `a="1 2 3" b="4 5 6" mycmd "arg 1" "arg 2"`.

FWIW, I agree `help= cmd` looks a bit funny, though a user could probably also say, in the interests of clarity, `help=1 cmd` or `help='' cmd` if the convention was to ignore the value of `$help` and just go by its existence.

cmd [key1] arg1 [key2=val2] arg2 is interesting. Thanks for that!