ENH: ma.asarray() and ma.asanyarray() will pass through input of the correct type.

If x is of type MaskedArray for ma.asarray(x) or any subtype of
MaskedArray for ma.asanyarray(x), these functions will simply return x.
This makes them consistent with their numpy counterparts.

Closes gh-4043.
BUG: Fixed mask_rowcols().

Previous implementation relied on ma.asarray() to always create
a new object.

See gh-4043.
BUG: Error checks for the dtype shape.

Also creates a clean tuple for the shape tuple, instead of
passing potentially mutable objects through.

Closes gh-4009
ENH: Type specific binary search functions for `searchsorted`

This PR replaces the generic binary search functions used by `searchsorted`
with type specific ones for numeric types. This results in a speed-up of
calls to `searchsorted` which is highly dependent on the size of the
'haystack' and the 'needle', with typical values for large enough needles
in the 1.5x - 3.0x for direct searches (i.e. without a `sorter` argument)
and 1.2x - 2.0x for indirect searches. A summary benchmark on float and
int arrays can be found [here](https://gist.github.com/jaimefrio/8704101).

Furthermore, the type specific binary search functions can take strided
inputs for all their arguments, which is a step in the right direction to
eventually add an `axis` argument to `searchsorted`.
BUG: check for monotonic bin arrays in digitize

The check for monotonic bin arrays of digitize doesn't properly handle
inputs with repeated entries at the beginning of the array:

```
>>> np.__version__
'1.8.0'
>>> np.digitize([1], [0, 0 , 2])
array([2], dtype=int64)
>>> np.digitize([1], [2, 2, 0])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: The bins must be monotonically increasing or decreasing
```

Modified `check_array_monotonic` in `_compiled_base.c` to skip over repeating
entries before deciding to check for increasing or decreasing monotonicity
and added relevant tests to `test_function_base.py`.
BUG: fix scalar type memory leak

have an explicit tp_free that is different from PyObject_Free which is also the
tp_free of PyBaseObject so python does not COPYSLOT it, instead it takes the
next parent PyInt which has a different allocator.
Also added it for arrays just in case, currently not required as they don't
don't inherit from a python type.
- Modified resetting of binary search indices when multiple keys are being
  searched, following @juliantaylor's suggestion. This speeds up searches of
  ordered keys by a lot (up to 3x), but slightly slows down purely random
  keys. Some benchmarks are available [here](https://gist.github.com/jaimefrio/8704101#file-gistfile2-txt)
- Added tests for proper handling of the smart index resetting when the last
  key was larger than all items in the searched array.
- Added basic tests for all implemented dtypes.
- This last change unearthed a funny behavior of `PyArray_CheckFromAny`,
  which was changing the byteorder attribute of `NPY_UBYTE` from `NPY_IGNORE`
  to `NPY_NATIVE`, and triggering lots of failures in `np.core.test()`. So I
  modified `PyArray_CheckFromAny` to leave `NPY_IGNORE` byteorders alone.
- Removed the now unused binary search functions from `item_selection.c`.
Merge pull request #4248 from juliantaylor/scalar-memleak

BUG: fix scalar type memory leak
Detect vendor versions of GNU Compilers

Cray and other HPC vendors provide patched versions of the GNU compilers
with modified version strings.  Use re.search instead of re.match in the
version detection scripts to account for modified version strings.

Ref: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/4259
ENH: remove insecure mktemp use

mktemp only returns a filename, a malicous user could replace it before
it gets used.
Merge pull request #4262 from juliantaylor/mktemp-remove

remove insecure mktemp usage
ENH: Attempt to rewrite the index parsing.

Some optimizations still missing.
WIP: Speed improvements by using EXTERNAL_LOOP
WIP,TST: Fix tests to match new behaviour
WIP: use fast_take and fix Deprecations
WIP,TST: Small fixes for the tests
WIP: bug fixes and field oder access change
WIP,TST: Fixup python3 tests
WIP: fix field order; And MapIterNext iteration end
WIP,TST,DOC: tiny fix

maybe triggers Travis too...