[Numpy-discussion] ticket 788: possible blocker

[Eric Firing]

Jarrod et al.,

I just ran into a nasty bug, described in ticket 788: under some 
circumstances, which I don't understand, the astype method fails to 
return a copy and returns the original array instead. It causes bizarre 
behavior in basemap (Jeff Whitaker's mapping toolkit for matplotlib), 
which is where I stumbled over it.

The ticket includes a pickled array that illustrates the behavior with 
1.2.0.dev5150--at least on my system (ubuntu feisty, 32-bit).

Eric