Can't exponentiate zero in NumPy

[Rick Muller]

I'm hoping someone can help me track down a potential bug that one of my 
users is reporting.

This user claims that exponentiating zero in Numeric raises an 
exception. It isn't clear to me whether the violating code is a single 
value or an array of zeros. That is

from Numeric import *
a = zeros(3,Float)
b = 0
print a**(4./3.)
print b**(4./3.)

I have not been able to get back in contact with this user to double 
check how and when this fails, and everything works on all of the 
machines I have at my disposal here.

Has anyone seen this before? Can anyone verify that it fails? Can anyone 
suggest an elegant workaround for the array case?

Thanks in advance,

Rick