In "numerictypes.py' it says "This module is designed so 'from numerictypes import *' is safe." When I "import numerictypes", and run dir(), I get: ['Any', 'AnyType', 'Bool', 'BooleanType', 'Byte', 'Complex', 'Complex32', 'Complex64', 'ComplexType', 'Double', 'Float', 'Float32', 'Float64', 'FloatingType', 'Int', 'Int16', 'Int32', 'Int64', 'Int8', 'IntegralType', 'Long', 'MAX_ALIGN', 'NumericType', 'Short', 'SignedIntegralType', 'SignedType', 'UInt16', 'UInt32', 'UInt64', 'UInt8', 'UnsignedIntegralType', 'UnsignedType', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__name__', 'genericCoercions', 'genericPromotionExclusions', 'genericTypeRank', 'inttype1', 'inttype2', 'kind', 'mapto', 'maptype1', 'maptype2', 'nt1', 'nt2', 'ntypesize1', 'ntypesize2', 'numinclude', 'outtype', 'pythonTypeMap', 'pythonTypeRank', 'rank1', 'rank2', 'scalarTypeMap', 'signedtype1', 'signedtype2', 'typeDict', 'typecode', 'typecodes'] A bunch of leading "_" are needed. ---------------- My code is: #! /usr/bin/env python from numerictypes import UInt8 print UInt8 == "ABC" The message is: Traceback (most recent call last): File "./silly02.py", line 5, in ? print UInt8 == "ABC" File "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/numarray/numerictypes.py", line 101, in __cmp__ other = typeDict[other] KeyError: ABC I would expect that the only object == to UInt8 be itself. Maybe add a function comparetypecodes(x, y) which returns True iff x and y are either NumericType's or strings which represent the same type.