BUG: np.sctypeNA['i8'] and np.sctypeNA['f8'] have different semantics

[eric-wieser]

Part of cleaning up numerictypes.py. The following looks wrong to me:

>>> np.sctypeNA['i8']  # any integer type
<type 'numpy.int64'>
>>> np.sctypeNA['f8']  # any non-integer type
'Float64'

Surely these should both return type objects, rather than sometimes returning strings?

[eric-wieser]

According to #997, looks like these should actually both return strings

[eric-wieser]

Looks like these have been wrong for all of time (03d6cb1)

[mattip]

We could just deprecate sctypeNA, it seems undocumented and unused. A quick grep shows no use of it in scipy. The same for typeNA.

[eric-wieser]

I'd be completely on board with that. Also:

>>> np.typeNA is np.sctypeNA
True