PEP-3118 specifies strongly typed multi-dimensional arrays. The existing
code in the 3.2 memoryview as well as numerous comments by Travis Oliphant
make it clear that these capabilities were intended from the start for
memoryview as well.

Perhaps the name "memoryview" is a misnomer, since the boundaries between
memoryview and NumPy's ndarray become blurry. In fact, the small
implementation of an ndarray in Modules/_testbuffer.c is *also* a memoryview
in some sense, since it can grab a buffer from an exporter and expose it in
the same manner as memoryview.

So what I implemented is certainly not only *my* vision. The PEP essentially
describes NumPy arrays with an interchange format to convert between NumPy
and PIL arrays.

It is perhaps unfortunate that the protocol was named "buffer" protocol,
since it is actually an advanced "array" protocol.

NumPy arrays don't care about the raw memory. It is always the logical array
that matters. For example, Fortran and C arrays have different bit patterns
in memory but compare equal, a fact that the 3.2 implementation completely
misses.

Arrays v and w are equal iff format and shape are equal and for all valid
indices allowed by shape

  memcmp((char *)PyBuffer_GetPointer(v, indices),
         (char *)PyBuffer_GetPointer(w, indices),
         itemsize) == 0.

Equal formats of course imply equal itemsize.