Not an educator, but since no-one seems to have mentioned this: I often use "os.system('clear')" for quick and dirty terminal animations, eg. to debug a maze solver for some competitive coding challenge... Not much of a use case, and doesn't really matter if it's not portable.
On Tue, 13 Oct 2020 23:36 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? > > On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 11:25 AM Mike Miller <python-id...@mgmiller.net> > 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 >> _______________________________________________ >> 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/MX54AOXMYJHGRVOO2XW3J7JWHQDDUKPQ/ >> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ >> > > > -- > --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/> > _______________________________________________ > 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/J65P6UELD4RSSCSMAFYF52WADURHX2HL/ > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ >
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