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Use cases are important. Oddly(?) enough, I've never had a 
need for a bigint conversion in a C struct, and have a hard 
time imagining I will someday. All the cases I've had (and I've 
had more than a few) were one-shot str->long or long->str 
conversions. An obvious example in the core is the tedious 
encode_long() and decode_long() functions in pickle.py. 
Note that a pickle.encode_long() workalike doesn't know in 
advance how many bytes it needs, which would make using 
struct a PITA for that particular use case. If a proposal isn't 
convenient for taking over existing conversions of this nature, 
that counts against it.