in reply to how did this module get into CPAN ?!
It really seems you have looked at the source of getopt but read the man page of some basic getopt of an old C library or something.
That would explain that you see undocumented features where everyone else sees a feature deficiency in your code
Switch clustering is a must-have. If you look at system utilities like ls, man, cp, tar, ssh,..., they all do it. Not that that is a reason in itself, but a consistent user interface is the holy grail of all interface design and a module going against that is simply not going to be used.
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