On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 03:35:58PM -0700, Guido van Rossum 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?
I think it's a personal preference to remove the visible clutter from the screen without going so far as to exit the interpreter and start a new session. And I do it frequently, in both Python and bash. Because I never remember the name of the bash command to do it (cls or clear?), and Python doesn't have one, I just hold down the Enter key for a couple of seconds until there's no clutter visible. (I just tried it in bash now, and it is spelled "clear", and it clears the scrollback buffer as well as just clearing the visible clutter on the screen.) Oh, apparently Ctrl-L works too. I don't know if that's a feature of my terminal or of the Python interpreter. There's supposed to be a magic escape sequence that will clear the screen when printed, if your terminal supports it, but I never remember that either. Let me look it up... print("\x1b[H\x1b[2J") seems to work. -- Steve