I want to thank everyone who participated in this discussion: Peter, Fernando, Robert, Paul, Perry, and Tim. Tim's post has IMO a completely synthesized solution: 1. Add a type parameter to sum which defaults to widest type. 2. Add a type parameter to reductions (and fix output type handling). Default is same-type as it is now. No major changes to C-code. 3. Add a WidestType(array) function: Bool --> Bool Int8,Int16,Int32,Int64 --> Int64 UInt8, UInt16,UInt32,UInt64 --> UInt64 (Int64 on win32) Float32, Float64 --> Float64 Complex32, Complex64 --> Complex64 The only thing this really leaves out, is a higher performance implementation of sum/mean which Peter referred to a few times. Peter, if you want to write a specialized module, we'd be happy to put it in the add-ons package. Thanks again everybody, Todd -- Todd Miller <jmiller@stsci.edu>