Instead they should request and take into consideration the buffer object's data format.  For example, surely we don't want to treat floating point binary representations as string characters:

>>> from array import array
>>> a = array('f', [1.2, 2.3, 3.4])
>>> int(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: b'\x9a\x99\x99?33\x13@\x9a\x99Y@'

It's even a little dangerous, since you can get "lucky" with certain binary representations:

>>> a = array('I', [875770417, 875770420])
>>> int(a)
12344234