I agree that's a bit confusing here, and there might be some room for
improvement (for example, changing the current
`if m is nomask` to `if m is nomask or m.any()==False`, or better, forcing
mask to nomask if mask.any()==False). But I don;t think that qualifies as
bug.

In the original MA in Numeric, I decided that to constantly check for masks that didn't actually mask anything was not a good idea. It punishes normal use with a very expensive check that is rarely going to be true.

If you are in a setting where you do not want this behavior, but instead want masks removed whenever possible, you may wish to wrap or replace things like masked_array so that they call make_mask with flag = 1:

y = masked_array(data, make_mask(maskdata, flag=1))

y will have no mask if maskdata is all false.

Thanks to Pierre for pointing out about masked_print_option.

Paul