Clearing the screen and other such things.

[Skef Wholey <Wholey@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

    Date: Friday, 26 July 1985  14:49-EDT
    From: Kent M Pitman <KMP at SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>
    To:   COMMON-LISP at SU-AI.ARPA
    Re:   Clearing the screen and other such things.

    As nearly as I can tell, Common Lisp offers no way to even clear the
    screen.  In the absence of a graphics standard, can we commit to even
    something so simple as a CLEAR-SCREEN function? In fact, I'd like to see
    as many of the functions below as we could agree on; please note that
    this suggestion is not meant to preclude a more sophisticated graphics
    proposal. It is only meant to acknowledge the fact that many interesting
    portable applications can be written using a single fixed width fonts
    and character coordinates.

However many months ago all of those wonderful "special interest group"
CL-mumble mailing lists were set up, I thought that such a thing would be what
the CL-Windows group would try to put together first.  Instead, people in the
group got caught up in worrying about "real" (read "hairy, ANSI, and COBOLISH")
window/graphics systems and how one might get Lisp to talk to them.

I would really like to see a well-specified pseudo-standard text window system
that has enough hooks for, say, a text editor wanting to do reasonably clever
redisplay.  We should be able to agree on something at about the level of what
KMP proposed, I should hope.  This is something a lot of us want, but doesn't
exactly fall in the domains of either the CL-Graphics or CL-Windows groups.

We could perhaps create a CL-Text-Windows group for just such a thing.

Or perhaps we should keep it "out here in the open", where issues don't die as
easily as in the smaller groups.

Or a bunch of us could do things with a private mailing list, implement this
thing for our various Common Lisps, and present it (perhaps along with
semi-portable code to implement stuff) to the Common Lisp community when we
like what we've got.

Any takers on any of the above?

--Skef