Why is there no platform independent way of clearing a terminal?

[Tim Harig]

On 2010-08-01, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 01/08/2010 06:17, Tim Harig wrote:
>> On 2010-08-01, Lawrence D'Oliveiro<ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand>  wrote:
>>> In message<i2q3sk$3pf$1 at speranza.aioe.org>, Tim Harig wrote:
>>>
>>>> It would be rewarding as it would make writing cross-platform charactor
>>>> mode applications possible.
>>>
>>> I thought Windows users were allergic to command lines.
>>
>> To the best of my knowledge, there have never been any documentated
>> cases of computer software related alleries.  There are however several
>> chemicals used in the process of constructing computer hardware componets
>> which have been linked to allergy illnesses.  Maybe Windows users are
>> simply allergic to their computers.
>
> Windows users biggest allergy is to this strange world that involves 
> "make" on other boxes, whatever that is, it strikes me as rather 
> archaic.  Personally I find double clicking on an msi file rather easier.

I work with several thousand computers located on three different
continents.  Few of them have mice attached to them.  If you think double
clicking is a better method, be my guest; but, you need to get a package
installed and configured on all of them before lunch.

Its also kind of funny that I couldn't get the msi to work with a large
percentage of the systems that I work with.  Make works on all but one out
of the box, and potentially on the last with the addition of SFU or
Cygwin.

With all that said, I am still not sure what the make/msi question has
anything to do with packing a backup, cross platform, implementation of
curses that allows the curses module to give Python a cross platform method
of character mode manipulation.