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

[MRAB]

Mark Lawrence wrote:
> On 02/08/2010 19:14, Benjamin Kaplan wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 9:51 AM, David Robinow<drobinow at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Benjamin Kaplan
>>> <benjamin.kaplan at case.edu>  wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>> So these are the packages needed just to run Python in Ubuntu. It 
>>>> doesn't
>>>> include the packages required for the kernel, the desktop environment,
>>> the
>>>> window manager, the terminal, and whatever else you want running. In my
>>>> fairly clean Ubuntu VM (I use it almost exclusively for testing), I 
>>>> have
>>>> close to 1500 packages installed.
>>>   As an admittedly stupid comparison, I have 1579 DLLs in my
>>> \windows\system32 directory.
>>> Some number of these have been upgraded by Windows Update. This is XP
>>> Service Pack 3.
>>> I'm not sure if this means that Windows is better because it has more
>>> packages or that it is worse because it's got too many. :)
>>>   --
>>>
>>
>> A package is usually more than one file.
>> http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/amd64/linux-image-2.6.32-21-generic/filelist 
>>
>>
>>
>>>   http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>>>
>>
> 
> This is all very well, but what is the unladen airspeed velocity of a 
> swallow in flight?  Answers on a postcard please, given that I expect 
> both direction and speed!
> 
African or European? :-)