On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 9:38 AM Guido van Rossum
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?
Quite honestly, I don't know. As an educator, I often see students clear the screen, and it's usually NOT helpful to me, as it erases potentially-valuable information about what happened. My best guess is that students get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information (XKCD 1369) and feel more comfortable erasing it. Another possibility is that someone's trying to create a hybrid of scrolling text UI and curses-like UI. Either way, I don't see this as something worth encouraging. IMO it's an attractive nuisance that ultimately won't help in very many situations. If you're in one of those few situations where it IS appropriate to clear the screen (and it's not better to grab ncurses), shelling out to clear/cls is good enough that it doesn't need to be a dedicated built-in. If other educators have the opposite view, I would definitely like to hear from you - would help me better understand my students' actions. ChrisA