The reason why I think 501 is important, is because otherwise if comparing an array to a Table, you'll get an ugly traceback saying that array has no attribute observation_ids. @teravest, reported this and I added that check just to avoid that problem.

On May 1, 2014, at 10:11 AM, Daniel McDonald <notifications@github.com> wrote:

> In biom/table.py:
> 
> >              return False
> >          if self.observation_metadata != other.observation_metadata:
> >              return False
> >          if self.sample_metadata != other.sample_metadata:
> >              return False
> > -        if not self._data_equality(other):
> > +        if self.type != other.type:
> this test is still important, but the test on line 501 may not be, though I think we should retain it in the event of subclasses of Table in the future
> 
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