[Python-3000] pre-PEP: Enhancing buffer protocol (tp_as_buffer)

[Travis Oliphant]

It was so nice to see many of you at PyCon this year.  The event was 
very well handled and congradulations are deserved all around.

I brought up the idea of the array interface several times.  After I 
heard Guido's keynote and saw the scheduled time-lines, I realized that 
my approach should be to push for the array interface into Python 3.0 as 
an enhancement/adaptation of the buffer protocol (which I have not heard 
or seen much discussion about).

Later we can back-port the result to Python 2.6.

To encourage a useful discussion, I've started a Wiki that describes the 
idea behind my proposal and placed it at:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/ArrayInterface

The basic idea is to define a memory-view object which is returned by 
the buffer-protocol and contains not just a pointer to the memory but 
also shape, stride, and data-format information.

It would be nice if there were also some additions to the Python C-API 
to make it easy to work with this memory-view object, but I don't 
envision needing to make this object available to Python directly.

I'm willing to work on this buffer protocol and maintain it as well in 
the future.

Thanks for any comments and/or feedback.

Best regards,

-Travis