Removing/destroying a turtle from a screen

[karelhusa]

Feature or enhancement
Add new TurtleScreen method to remove a specific turtle.
screen.remove(turtle)

The turtle will be removed and no longer associated with the screen. Finally the object can be collected by the garbace collector.

Pitch

Turtle is a great way to learn Python and we use it with students to make simple games. In some games we create many turtles.

When I create a new turtle with:
my_turtle = turtle.Turtle()

I can:

• hide it with turtle.hideturtle()
• clear the drawing with turtle.clear()

However, I have no simple way to remove (destroy) the turtle.

It's a good programming practice to free the object that is no longer being used, so I would like to remove the unused turtles. Otherwise the turtles are piling up.

Previous discussion
This missing feature is discussed at multiple places on the web, e.g.:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43972351/how-to-fully-delete-a-turtle
There is no simple solution so far, rather complicated.

And since "Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated." I propose this enhancement.

[kcarnold]

My first thought was that turtles should have a __del__ and TurtleScreen should hold weakrefs to the turtles. But that would break code that depends on screen.turtles() holding the turtles list; i.e., we don't ask users to keep references to the turtles they want. So I conclude that the approach here—explicitly removing the turtle—is probably needed.

Perhaps my_turtle.remove() would also be useful.

But: what happens if someone later runs my_turtle.forward(), or my_turtle.onkey()? Some of the housekeeping logic depends on _turtles being a superset of the turtles that might draw on the screen. This would need some care.