some thought about pcdl as data storage format.

[elmbeech]

get_pcdl_version function for mcds timestep missing.
this might be handy, since uqpc started to use pcdl timestep objects as storage format, which, of course, they were never meant to be used for.

possibly as well a save to file and load from file function implemented with pickle?
next would possibly be that you can update a mcds object from one to the next pcdl version. oh no.
not sure if i shoud go down that rabbit hole, because that was never the purpose of pcdl. the defatco file format is mcds!

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html

[elmbeech]

1. the get_pcdl_version function became live with v4.1.3.
2. i decied that pcdl is not a data storage format. pcdl was always tough to be a data format transformer, a data format interface, and it will stay like this. i will neither offer a save nor a load function, especially because of version-to-version incompatibility, which i not want to deal with. In other words, loading with the lates pcdl a mcdsts dating back to the last ice age or something like this .
3. i might implement a downcast function which let you transform 64 bit float values into 32, 16, or 8 bit values.
   totally ok with this. who not likes 8 bit :').

[elmbeech]

overthinking all of this, because the back end of pcdl is nowadays mainly pandas, i think a no pickle base read and write pcdl function would not be that hard to implement.