I occasionally find it useful to clear the screen when doing
demos/presentations. I think the case for it is clear (hah) enough based on
its long history and presence in many terminal emulators. But then again,
the terminals I use and readline support it already, so I don't need python
repl  to do it for me.

+1 on having it. -1 on doing it in Python, per se. net +0.

On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 19:12 David Mertz <[email protected]> wrote:

> I teach a lot.  But it's adults, and ones who have at least a little bit
> of programming experience (perhaps in a different language, but something).
>
> I've never had anyone request a "clear screen" command.  Of course, I
> usually use Jupyter notebooks for teaching, so I'm not sure what that would
> mean there anyway.  But it definitely feels like a UI thing, not a PL
> thing.  About 30 seconds ago, I typed `%clear` in IPython... I'm not
> certain it is the first time I've ever done so, but quite likely.  It was
> amazing, my screen was cleared :-).
>
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 6:38 PM Guido van Rossum <[email protected]> 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?
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 11:25 AM Mike Miller <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On 2020-10-13 06:19, Stestagg wrote:
>>> > For example, the pypi `console` library provides a method:
>>> `console.sc.reset()`
>>> > that behaves similarly to `CLS` on windows and also appears to be
>>> fairly
>>> > reliable cross-platform.
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, there is more to it than appears at first glance.  There is
>>> resetting the
>>> terminal, clearing the currently visible screen, and/or the scrollback
>>> buffer as
>>> well.
>>>
>>> The legacy Windows console has another limitation in that I don't
>>> believe it has
>>> a single API call to clear the whole thing.  One must iterate over the
>>> whole
>>> buffer and write spaces to each cell, or some similar craziness.  That's
>>> why
>>> even folks writing C++ just punt and do a system("cls") instead.
>>>
>>> With the mentioned lib console, the example above prints the ANSI codes
>>> to do a
>>> terminal reset, and while that works widely these days, it should not be
>>> the
>>> first choice.  It would be better to use the cross-platform wrapper
>>> functions in
>>> the console.utils module, either:
>>>
>>>      # A DOS-like reset, clears screen and scrollback, also aliased to
>>> cls()
>>>      reset_terminal()
>>>
>>>      # A Unix-like clear, configurable via param, and aliased to clear()
>>>      clear_screen()
>>>
>>> -Mike
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>>
>>
>> --
>> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
>> *Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)*
>> <http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-change-the-world/>
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>
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