On 2020-10-13 15:35, Guido van Rossum wrote:
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?
Not Windows specific, no. I've never thought of it as beginner-specific either. It's an ANSI standard terminal feature that existed beforehand, right? My knowledge before that is limited.
Why? It's mostly about focus I suppose. Commonly used when switching to a new task, logging out for security reasons, or perhaps when there are several terminals on screen at once which have not been used in a while. Stale output is no longer relevant and becomes visual clutter.
I use it most often when there's a ton of debug log messages from a service. This makes the scrollbar more useful because (cleared beforehand) output now represents 100% of the scrollback when needing to pinpoint a problem at a particular time.
So I believe there's room for terminal functionality in Python between "dumb" output and a full screen TUI, such as would be used in a wizard-type program, or clearing before printing a current status.
In terms of common use, I'd guess it has something to do with one's personality. What does your desk look like right now? Piles of papers everywhere, or neat as a pin minimalism? A spectrum of folks exist and are good contributors.
A few other folks commented that they don't use it. I've personally never used a number of features in the stdlib either. However, this one is simple to implement and commonly expected.
-Mike _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/6WU7UHCMS5BEX3ZVY7U55BUNHKJQ6M7N/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
