In the buffer protocol it used to advertise untyped data with B as the
format string, but the __getitem__ and __setitem__ were using the char
type (implicitly coming from the fact that the type exposed is
ArrayView<char>, StridedArrayViewND<char> or their const variants),
resulting in the data being treated as characters by Python. Which
was extremely annoying and inconsistent with how the bytes and bytearray
behaves.
Now ArrayView bindings always operate with std::uint8_t, and for
StridedArrayView there's a special case for the <char> type, which makes
it treated as std::uint8_t as well. Furthermore, to hint that the <char>
is "general data", the format string for it is null / None instead of B.
Changed those to be IndexError instead of ValueError, since those are
indexing dimensions. Plus added a new check for broadcasted dimension
size as otherwise it'd blow up on a C++ assert.
Not ArrayView yet, and also no documentation on this whatsoever. That'll
come next. Also not everything works with arbitrary types yet,
converting from buffer protocol doesn't remember the format and
conversion to bytes doesn't take the actual type size into account
either.
Vladimír Vondruš