[Python-Dev] PEP 3118: Extended buffer protocol (new version) (original) (raw)

Travis Oliphant oliphant.travis at ieee.org
Tue Apr 10 02:58:06 CEST 2007

Carl Banks wrote:

Travis Oliphant wrote: > PyBUFREADONLY > The returned buffer must be readonly and the underlying object should make > its memory readonly if that is possible. I don't like the "if possible" thing. If it makes no guarantees, it pretty much useless over PyBUFSIMPLE. O.K. Let's make it raise an error if it can't set it read-only.

PyBUFFORMAT The consumer will be using the format string information so make sure that member is filled correctly. Is the idea to throw an exception if there's some other data format besides "b", and this flag isn't set? It seems superfluous otherwise.

The idea is that a consumer may not care about the format and the exporter may want to know that to simplify the interface. In other words the flag is a way for the consumer to communicate that it wants format information (or not).

If the exporter wants to raise an exception if the format is not requested is up to the exporter.

PyBUFSHAPE The consumer can (and might) make use of using the ndims and shape members of the structure so make sure they are filled in correctly. PyBUFSTRIDES (implies SHAPE) The consumer can (and might) make use of the strides member of the structure (as well as ndims and shape) Is there any reasonable benefit for allowing PyBUFSHAPE without PyBUFSTRIDES? Would the array be C- or Fortran-like?

Yes, I could see a consumer not being able to handle simple striding but could handle shape information. Many users of NumPy arrays like to think of the array as an N-d array but want to ignore striding.

I've made the changes in numpy's SVN. Hopefully they will get mirrored over to the python PEP directory eventually.

-Travis

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