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This issue has already been raise in
http://bugs.python.org/issue9334
argparse does not accept options taking arguments beginning with dash (regression from optparse)
There I proposed leaving '_negative_number_matcher' unchanged, but only use it to set '_has_negative_number_optionals'. Testing whether argument strings are numbers or not is better done with 'complex()'.
 if not self._has_negative_number_optionals:
 try:
 complex(arg_string)
 return None
 except ValueError:
 pass
That was my first patch, and I haven't looked at it much since then, other than testing that it is compatible with a number of other proposed patches.