In making the example, I was overzealous.  It actually applies only to structured arrays (where I first ran into it).

```
In [5]: x = numpy.array([(1,), (2,), (3,)], [(u'bar', ">f8")])                                                                                                                                         
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-5-540849762043> in <module>()
----> 1 x = numpy.array([(1,), (2,), (3,)], [(u'bar', ">f8")])

TypeError: data type not understood

In [6]: x = numpy.array([(1,), (2,), (3,)], [('bar', ">f8")])
```

As for `struct`, the bug is only on Python 2.6, not 2.7.