pandas (original) (raw)

One additional API question that pops up: in numpy, astype(.., copy=False) seems to return itself if it doesn't need to copy (I am actually also relying on this in the if data is self._data check).
But in the EA implementation, we always return a new array object, potentially with the same backing data. But we could in principle also do something like if dtype == self.dtype and not copy: return self (and that should already catch the one case where a copy can be avoided I think, and we could simply always copy in the other cases)