The issue there is cross-platform compatibility; the Windows and Unix versions take completely different constructor arguments, so how should we paper over the differences?
Unix arguments: (file descriptor, size, flags, protection) Win32 arguments:(filename, tagname, size)
We could just say, "OK, the args are completely different between Win32 and Unix, despite it being the same function name". Maybe that's best, because there seems no way to reconcile those two different sets of arguments.
I guess my approach would be to provide two platform-specific modules, and to figure out a high-level Python module which could provide a reasonable platform-independent interface on top of it. One problem with that approach is that I think that there is also great value in having a portable mmap interface in the C layer, where i see lots of possible uses in extension modules (much like the threads API).
I don't know enough about this, but it seems that there might be two steps: *creating* a mmap object is necessarily platform-specific; but *using* a mmap object could be platform-neutral. What is the API for mmap objects? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)