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Martin, I was typing as you submitted your most recent comment.

I am honestly shocked that you would suggest that longs
should gain a method for encoding themselves as binary
strings.  Such a thing would then suggest that standard ints
and floats also gain such methods.  It would also imply that
since one can go to strings, one should equivalently be able
to come from strings via equivalent methods.  Goodness,
int.tostring(width) and int.fromstring(str)?  But what about
endianness?

Looks like a big can of worms to me.