When querying an object that supports the buffer protocol, that object
must now return a typecode (as per binary.[ch]). This does not have to
be honoured by the caller, but can be useful for determining element
size.
Only calcsize() and unpack() functions provided so far, for little-endian
byte order. Format strings don't support repition spec (like "2b3i").
Unfortunately, dealing with all the various binary type sizes and alignments
will lead to quite a bloated "binary" helper functions - if optimizing for
speed. Need to think if using dynamic parametrized algos makes more sense.