[IronPython] memoryview

[Peter Schwalm]

Hi Marcus, hi Jeff,

thank you for the suggestions!

I considered using the .net functions for i-o and byte arrays and 
decided not to. The reason: the module I am talking about is used in an 
environment of everyday programming, often in a quick and dirty manner. 
The data used are 1-byte characters and are mostly text, but with mixed 
in binary sections. The module users are used to treating chars as being 
of no special meaning. Umlauts, encodings, and the like do not need to 
be considered; they are interpreted elsewhere, and it is only expected 
that these characters are *preserved*, i.e. simply not changed.

On the other hand we need string functions like slicing, find, replace, 
startswith and the like for interpretating the relevant parts. Byte 
arrays do not fit good there, and even worse would be an environment of 
mixed bytes and unicode with frequent conversions. Unwanted encoding and 
decoding problem would probably show up. It would be somewhat confusing 
and it would require a too technical view in a context focused on 
application logic.

In the moment, I can only hope that no information is lost during the 
implicit conversions of file i-o. That means I hope these conversion 
simply add a 0-byte to every byte read in to make it unicode and only 
discards the 0-byte when writing to a file.

Best regards
Peter