Strange error when downloading from "youtube.com/watch?v"

[ScttB]

>youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
[generic] watch?v: Requesting header
[redirect] Following redirect to https://www.youtube.com/
[generic] www.youtube: Requesting header
WARNING: Falling back on generic information extractor.
[generic] www.youtube: Downloading webpage
[generic] www.youtube: Extracting information
ERROR: Unsupported URL: https://www.youtube.com/

What I think should happen instead of this is

>youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
ERROR: Video not set - check URL for errors

I believe this behavior should be implemented is because if you use youtube-dl in a batch script, this error might happen because of the = being ignored by a parsing error if the URL is not enclosed in double-quotations when invoked.

Possibly you could check if the program is running from a batch script on Windows and return ERROR: Put URL in double-quotes?

[dstftw]

Controlling proper escaping or quoting is responsibility of a user not youtube-dl. Needless to say it's technically impossible to know whether the original URL contained unescaped & or not.

[ScttB]

I didn't ask to control escaping. I asked for the error to be more informative, assuming it might have been ruined by escaping or user error.
Edit: Also, I was not talking about &, I was talking about =.