[burntsushi]

> It looks like Rust is doing things Python-style, which is a scary thought. Instead of providing distinct ways to change endianness and to interpret data as integers, the functionality is crammed into one interface.

Except it's not. These specific methods aren't some grand interface to change endianness. These are convenience routines for converting between bytes and integers, which is a not altogether uncommon thing to do. I certainly do it a lot.

The existence of these byte-to-integer conversion methods does not imply the non-existence of other methods to convert endianness within integers. Indeed, those methods have existed since Rust 1.0: `swap_bytes`, `from_be`, `from_le`, `to_be`, and `to_le` are all methods defined on {integer type} that return {integer type}.