Sorry James, we don't grow the APIs without sufficient demonstrated need; otherwise, we end-up with API sprawl.  People with actual use cases haven't requested behavior (and the occasional one-off gets by negating the numeric argument).  That is why the maxheap functions were intentionally made private.

FWIW, this module is very old and the core functions have long proven themselves sufficient to meet their use cases (like being used in an event loop to efficiently select the next scheduled event).