I'd like to suggest a modification to Getopt::Std. Instead of returning a value of 1 for options that don't require an argument, I'd like to return a value indicating how many times the option was invoked. Thus an option -vvv would set $opt_v to 3 instead of 1. Existing code would still operate correctly unless someone checked for $opt_v == 1 instead of merely testing $opt_v as true.