[Python-Dev] Fw: Behavior of buffer()

[Guido van Rossum]

It seems we're still in the same boat.  It would be saner to change
buffer slices to return buffer objects, except for backward
compatibility.  I was hoping to hear from someone who uses buffer
objects and knows that this would break his code.  Scott apparently
doesn't have this problem with his own code, so his opinion doesn't
help. :-(

Raymond's change still breaks compatibility, though, for slices
without begin and end points.  So we have a contradiction: out of fear
of breaking compatibility, we make a change that breaks
compatibility.

Maybe we should do the same with the buffer object as we did with
xrange(), and plan to remove all functionality that we aren't sure is
useful?  In 2.3, we would have to maintain compatibility but we could
warn about features that will go away; in 2.4, we could remove
unwanted features.

Maybe the name 'buffer' suggests false expectations?  It's not a
buffer, it's an alias for a memory area.

Maybe we should do something stronger, and deprecate the buffer type
altogether.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)