I have never had one of my students as for this. Note that clearing the screen (command window these days) IS common -- at least I do ti a lot :-) -- but with a keystroke, not in code.
I suspect Chris A is right -- this would be called for in a command-line / menu driven app that wasn't using full blown curses. I DID have a newbie (to Python, not programming) ask me a couple years ago how to write a simple text terminal app --- in that case a game, where they wanted to fully manipulate the screen, old fashioned DOS style. Honestly, I had no idea, but pointed them to curses, which they found too complicated -- but I don't think a clear terminal function would have solved their problem anyway :-) In short -- I see no need to add this to the stdlib. -CHB On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 3:47 PM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 9:38 AM Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> wrote: > > > > Can one of the educators on the list explain why this is such a commonly > required feature? I literally never feel the need to clear my screen -- but > I've seen this requested quite a few times in various forms, often as a bug > report "IDLE does not support CLS". I presume that this is a common thing > in other programming environments for beginners -- even C++ (given that it > was mentioned). Maybe it's a thing that command-line users on Windows are > told to do frequently? What am I missing that students want to do > frequently? Is it a holdover from the DOS age? > > > > Quite honestly, I don't know. As an educator, I often see students > clear the screen, and it's usually NOT helpful to me, as it erases > potentially-valuable information about what happened. My best guess is > that students get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information > (XKCD 1369) and feel more comfortable erasing it. > > Another possibility is that someone's trying to create a hybrid of > scrolling text UI and curses-like UI. > > Either way, I don't see this as something worth encouraging. IMO it's > an attractive nuisance that ultimately won't help in very many > situations. If you're in one of those few situations where it IS > appropriate to clear the screen (and it's not better to grab ncurses), > shelling out to clear/cls is good enough that it doesn't need to be a > dedicated built-in. > > If other educators have the opposite view, I would definitely like to > hear from you - would help me better understand my students' actions. > > ChrisA > _______________________________________________ > Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org > To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ > Message archived at > https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/VR5OFYAG3S4AFKLBXV5BOZBDMXELKYAO/ > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ > -- Christopher Barker, PhD Python Language Consulting - Teaching - Scientific Software Development - Desktop GUI and Web Development - wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython
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