This, and many other top-level functions, seem to be internal and of no direct use to the user.  In this case they should be preceded with an underscore to be made private by convention.  In general even if a method *could* be useful in some context (for example this one), it's a simple few lines of Python and we don't want to raise the complexity of our API by exposing it, also opening us to the risk of later deprecating it.  Users don't really *need* it from here, do they?

Of course it's up for debate!