Matthew Brett wrote:

Hi,

Forgive my ignorance, but why is this?

In [1]:from numpy import *

In [2]:if not dtype('

Truth value of user-built Python objects is tested by looking at: 1) __nonzero__ method is called to determine truth value. 2) sequence or mapping behavior (then the length is used. If the length is greater than 0, then True, otherwise it's False. For data-type objects, there is no __nonzero__ method, but it does have "mapping" behavior so that fields can be extracted from a data-type using mapping notation. The "length" of the data-type is the number of defined fields. Therefore, if the data-type has no defined fields, it's length is 0 and it's truth value is "False". So, you can think of the test as if dtype(...): print "Data-type has fields:" else: print "Data-type does not have fields:" -Travis