A more elegant way to flush print buffer?

[Chuck Swiger]

Teemu Luojola wrote:
> Is there any other way to flush the print buffer than to call 
> sys.stdout.flush()?

"print buffer"...?  There's no other way to flush stdout than doing the 
call, but there are better ways to draw an animated windmill character 
than writing backspaces and flushing.

 > Take as an example a simple "windmill" practice,
> like the following:

A long time ago, someone clever decided to figure out how to draw 
characters and move around the screen quickly in a platform-independant 
fashion: this is how termcap and curses came about.  Using the following 
semantics works much better, or at least the C version does:

	--

import curses
from curses import wrapper

def mvaddch(x,y,char): curses.wrapper('mvaddch',y,x,char)
def wrefresh(): curses.wrapper('wrefresh',0)
def FIXCURSOR(): """NA: was used to move the cursor back to another 
panel (for user input) to avoid flicker"""
def EDELAY(): """NA: was used to delay for 50 milliseconds via usleep()"""

def explode(x,y):
     """Draw an ASCII explosion at position x,y"""
     for index in range(7):
         mvaddch(x,y,'-')
         wrefresh()
         FIXCURSOR()
         EDELAY()
         mvaddch(x,y,'\\')
         wrefresh()
         FIXCURSOR()
         EDELAY()
         mvaddch(x,y,'|')
         wrefresh()
         FIXCURSOR()
         EDELAY()
         mvaddch(x,y,'/')
         wrefresh()
         FIXCURSOR()
         EDELAY()

     mvaddch(x,y,'*')
     wrefresh()
     EDELAY()
     mvaddch(x,y,'x')
     wrefresh()
     EDELAY()
     EDELAY()
     mvaddch(x,y,'.')
     wrefresh()
     EDELAY()
     FIXCURSOR()

if __name__ == "__main__":
     explode(10,20)

...only, how does one invoke the underlying curses implementation of 
mvaddch and such from Python?  Calling curses.wrapper didn't do what I 
expected, clearly enough.

-Chuck