On Tuesday 28 October 2003 11:09 pm, Neil Schemenauer wrote:
I happened to be looking at the buffer API today and I came across this posting from Guido:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/009974.html
Over the years there has been a lot of discussion about the buffer API and the buffer object. The general consensus seems to be that the buffer API is not ideal but nonetheless useful. The buffer object, OTOH, is considered fundamentally broken and should be removed.
Does anyone object to deprecating the 'buffer' builtin? Eventually we could remove the buffer object completely.
Is that about RW buffers specifically? Because I _have_ used R/O buffers in production code -- when I had a huge string already in memory, and needed various largish substrings of it at different but overlapping times, without paying the overhead to copy them as slicing would have done. Having 'buffer' as a buit-in was quite minor though -- considering the number of times I have used it, importing some module to get at it would have been perfectly acceptable, perhaps preferable. If the buffer interface stays but the function completely disappears, I guess it won't be too hard for me to recreate it in a tiny extension module, but it's not quite clear to me why I should need to. R/W buffers I've never used in production, though. I do recall once (at the very beginning of my Python usage) using an array's buffer_info method as a Q&D way to do some interfacing to C, but that was before ctypes, which I think is what i'd use now. Alex