Hear, hear. Using floats in arange is a lousy temptation that must be avoided. Apart from that I think that making float64 the default for most things is the right way to go. Numpy is primarily for numeric computation, and numeric computation is primarily in float64. Specialist areas like imaging can be dealt with as special cases.

BTW, can someone suggest the best way to put new code into Numpy at this point? Is there a test branch of some sort? I have some free time coming up in a few weeks and would like to do the following:

1) add a left/right option to searchsorted,
2) add faster normals to random,
3) add the MWC8222 generator to random,
3) add the kind keyword to the functional forms of sort (sort, argsort) as in numarray.