[Tutor] Re: clear screen [Let's make a feature request in Sourceforge!]

Magnus Lycka magnus@thinkware.se
Sat Nov 16 18:46:02 2002


At 12:20 2002-11-16 -0800, Danny Yoo wrote:
>For very simple programs (especially games), being able to clear the
>screen would be helpful:  it would allow beginners to write those kind of
>primitive user interfaces that we know are evil and crude, but are really
>easy to cook up.

Is this really helpful? :)
(Don't give in to the dark side of the force...)

Somehow, I feel the bad old platform dependent
os.system('cls') or os.system('clear') is better.
It doesn't pretend to be more than it is. I have
a feeling that we can't avoid that clearing the
screen IS platform dependent. Not only depending
on your OS, but also on your execution environment.
It's not the same if you are running your code from
the command prompt or from within IDLE etc. Using
os.system('cls') etc doesn't give any impression of
being more than it is... :)

>If 'curses' were more platform independent and less difficult to use for
>newcomers, this would be a nonissue; curses and its erase() method would
>be the right solution to clearing the console.

Agreed. Or if GUIs were more newbie-friendly, that
could be the right path. It's obvious that many newbies
want (and expect to be able) to write GUIs more or
less at once.

Perhaps we will have a big gap here until someone
creates something like Delphi or Visual Basic for
Python.


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Magnus Lycka, Thinkware AB
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