On 20Dec2020 08:51, Christopher Barker <pythonchb@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 8:53 PM Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
at sounds like a very special status. Why not os.clear()?
My anger at programmes which gratuitously clear the screen is large. (Years of anger watching IBM-derived PCs boot, particularly, when I want to see some diagnostic.) One problem is: what does it mean? On a terminal, easy. But in a GUI? Clear the screen (possibly forbidden)? A window? The "main" window? Etc. Anyway, I think it should be in curses (or be loaded via curses on demand), and just have a clear_screen function thus: def clear_screen(): setupterm() print(ti_getstr('cl'), end='', flush=True) I can already see many ways to bikeshed on that, alas. But the point here is that this is trivial function (albeit often wanted, however misguides I might personally consider that want to often be).
I also have no idea about implementation, but I"m sure there's a few folks with platform expertise that could make this work on many systems out of the box.
On terminals, see above. In a GUI, who knows? And how does one tell the programme which it is talking to?
is it so bad to use a subprocess?
Yes. It is _really slow_, depends on external reaources which might not be there, and subprocess brings other burdens too. Python comes with curses and that knows directly how to do this. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>