I don't think that would work, because looking more closely, I don't think they're actually doing anything like what __array_interface__/PEP3118 are designed for. They just have some custom class ("sage.rings.real_mpfr.RealLiteral", I guess an arbitrary precision floating point of some sort?), and they want instances that are passed to np.array() to be automatically coerced to another type (float64) by default. But there's no buffer sharing or anything like that going on at all. Mike, does that sound right?
This automagic coercion seems... in very dubious taste to me. (Why does creating an array object imply that you want to throw away precision? You can already throw away precision explicitly by doing np.array(f, dtype=float).) But if this automatic coercion feature is useful, then wouldn't it be better to have a different interface instead of kluging it into __array_interface__, like we should check for an attribute called __numpy_preferred_dtype__ or something?
Interesting. It does look like off-label use of the __array_interface__ attribute. Given that "array" used to query the __array_interface__ attribute for type discovery, I still wonder why it was disabled in 1.6? -Travis