On 16/10/2020 11:59, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 8:21 PM Rob Cliffe via Python-ideas <python-ideas@python.org> wrote:
On 13/10/2020 23:35, 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?
Sometimes I want a program that displays (more than 1 line of) real-time information in a Windows CMD box and refreshes it every few seconds (e.g. progress displays, monitoring open files/locks/connections/downloads etc.). It is natural to clear the screen and display the updated information.
Natural perhaps, but ugly. Much better to reposition the cursor and overwrite the previous text, with "clear to end of line" as required; that way, you avoid flicker.
C I do precisely that in many of my programs for e.g. single-line progress displays. But for multi-line output I don't know of any way to move the cursor back up. I work in Windows 10. Rob Cliffe