DOC -- add another paragraph note to ndarray.view docs

Since most numpy operations are not sensitive to underlying data
structure (C-ordered arrays vs fortran-ordered arrays, versus slices or
transposes of arrays, etc.), but structured-array views ARE sensitive to
that, it is worth saying it explicitly in the documentation.

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/numpy/ma/core.py b/numpy/ma/core.py
index dbd619b80..e895f8269 100644
--- a/numpy/ma/core.py
+++ b/numpy/ma/core.py
@@ -2889,6 +2889,12 @@ class MaskedArray(ndarray):
         `dtype` is an ndarray sub-class), then the fill value is preserved.
         Finally, if `fill_value` is specified, but `dtype` is not, the fill
         value is set to the specified value.
+        
+        In cases when ``a.view(some_dtype)`` causes a reinterpretation of the
+        bytes of memory, its behavior cannot necessarily be predicted just from
+        the superficial appearance of ``a`` (shown by ``print(a)``). If ``a`` is
+        C-ordered versus fortran-ordered, versus defined as a transpose, versus
+        defined as a slice, etc., the view may give different results.
         """
 
         if dtype is None: