> I am confused by MvL’s reply. From the first paragraph documentation
> for binascii: “Normally, you will not use these functions directly
> but use wrapper modules like uu, base64, or binhex instead. The
> binascii module contains low-level functions written in C for greater
> speed that are used by the higher-level modules.”
> 
> Is the doc not accurate?

It is correct. So use base64.b16encode/b16decode then.
It's just that I personally prefer hexlify/unhexlify, because I can
memorize the function name better.