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 <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
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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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