[Tutor] different behaviour in Idle shell vs Mac terminal

[Adam Gold]

I have short piece of code I'm using to print a string to the terminal one letter at a time.  It works fine when I invoke the script from within Idle; each letter appears after the preceding one according to the designated time interval.  However if I run it in the Mac terminal ('python3 ./script.py'), there's a pause and then the whole string prints in one go.  Here's the relevant code:

import sys
import time

text = "this text is printing one letter at a time..."
for char in text:
    sys.stdout.write(char)
    time.sleep(0.03)

I'm thinking this may be a tty issue (is stdout going to the right terminal?) but I'm still finding my way and would therefore appreciate any guidance.  Of course if there's a better way of printing out one letter at a time, I'm also interested to know that.  Thanks.

P.S. if it's relevant, this is part of a simple financial maths program and it's used to display the results after certain inputs have been gathered.