Sure, if you want to. [Then I won't be able to reproduce what's in the docs on either of my machines. :) One's 32-bit big-endian; the other's 64-bit little-endian.]
I guess it's painful either way. I think the only fair thing to do is provide examples for multiple scenarios, e.g. 32-bit little-endian, 64-bit big-endian, etc... Share the pain :)
Merged your changes and subsequent tweaks to py3k in r80016.
Cool, thanks! Your padding note tweak is a definite improvement over what I originally had.