[8] The command to output the human-readable form of the "vt100" terminal definition, for example, is:[7]The use of a machine-readable format was to avoid the unnecessary overhead, in applications programs using systems such as the termcap library, of repeatedly parsing the database content to read the fields of a record.
The terminal type name index is, effectively, the Unix/POSIX filesystem's ordinary directory structure.
More recent filesystem formats used on Unix systems don't suffer as much from such problems (because their on-disc directory structures are no longer simple arrays of entries, but are organized into trees or hash tables) and so the necessity for this design element, that still exists in modern terminfo implementations, has since disappeared.
The name of the database field that stores the output sequence for this is clear, so the command arguments to the tput program to clear the screen are [1] Another operation is initializing or resetting the terminal to a known default state (of character attributes, fonts, colours, and so forth).
This can be overridden, however, to force tput to look up a different terminal type in the database, with a command-line option to the command.