Need elegant way to cast four bytes into a long

[Grant Edwards]

In article <3f33c785$0$172$a1866201 at newsreader.visi.com>, Grant Edwards wrote:
> In article <3f33c209$1 at news.si.com>, William S. Huizinga wrote:
>> I've got an array.array of unsigned char and would like to make a slice
>> of that array (e.g. a[0:4]) become one long like I would in "C" :
>> 
>> 	l = ((unsigned long *) (&a[0]))[0];
> 
> Bad C programming.  Your program isn't portable.

Aside from the endian issue, it may even cause a bus fault or
completely bogus value on many architectures (ARM, SPARC,
etc.).  It's actually quite difficult to duplicate that sort of
behavior in Python.  ;)

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