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

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Daniel Fetchinson a écrit :
> Hi folks,
> 
> If I'm only interested in linux and windows I know I can do
> 
> ################################
> import os
> import platform
> 
> if platform.system( ) == 'Linux':
>     clear = 'clear'
> else:
>     clear = 'cls'
> 
> os.system( clear )
> ################################
> 
> or something equivalent using os.name and friends, but was wondering
> why there is no platform independent way (i.e. the platform dependence
> is taken care of by the python stdlib) of clearing a terminal. Sure,
> there are many different terminals and many different operating
> systems but in many areas python managed to hide all these
> complexities behind a well defined API.
> 
> Why was clearing a terminal left out?
> 

What you're talking about is a shell, not a terminal (a terminal is a 
physical device). And the shell is not necessarily part of the OS itself 
(there's no shortage of shells for unices / linux systems), so it 
doesn't belong to the os or platform modules.

FWIW, I can't tell for sure since I never used any other shell than 
bash, but I'm not sure your above code is garanteed to work on each and 
any possible unix shell.