WISHLIST:
- maybe use hdf5 instead of the ad hoc binary format
- add real documentation (e.g. sphinx)
- add structured docstrings to the python code (e.g. epydoc, reST)
- add real unit tests instead of just manually executed demos
- use something more advanced than tuples as the Python-C interface
- use file objects instead of file names for the Python-C interface
- report C code errors in a more sophisticated way than printing to stderr
