The point is that simple slicing will go away, and extended slices (with sliceobjects) are used in various places, and currently can't be passed on to ctypes arrays and pointers. That is to say, a Python class defining __getitem__ but not __getslice__ still supports slice syntax, but it can't do 'pointer[sliceobj]' -- it would have to do 'pointer[sliceobj.start:sliceobj.end]'. Also, because simple slices will go away, this code will have to be added to the p3yk branch in any case; having it in the trunk just makes for easier maintenance.

Oh, and the non-support for steps other than 1 is not a fundamental issue, I just couldn't bear to write the code for that if you didn't think it would be useful, as I'd already written the same logic and arithmetic for array, tupleseq, mmap and I forget what else :P You can consider this code half-done, if you wish; I'll get to it again soon enough.