ghc accepts a flag and its argument as a single quoted or escaped argument as well. For example all of the following are equivalent:

ghc -package foo 

ghc "-package foo"

ghc -package\ foo

Is this by design or accidental? 

This has a nice side effect to make passing ghc arguments via rughc simple. For example runghc "-package foo" or runghc -package\ foo will pass "-package foo" to ghc. The alternative and documented way to achieve the same effect is runghc -package --ghc-arg=foo which is not that convenient.

My question is - can we rely on this way of parsing? If it is not by design, does it make sense to legalize and therefore document this?

-harendra