The set/getRefVal functions of Data objects have been removed (mainly to avoid later problems with MPI).
Moreover, a faster access to the reference id of samples has been introduced. I don't think that anybody will
profit form this at this stage but it will allow a faster dump of data objects.

escript data objects can now be saved to netCDF files, see http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/.
Currently only constant data are implemented with expanded and tagged data to follow.
There are two new functions to dump a data object
s=Data(...)
s.dump(<filename>)
and to recover it
s=load(<filename>, domain)
Notice that the function space of s is recovered but domain is still need.
dump and load will replace archive and extract.
The installation needs now the netCDF installed.

I have done some clarification on functions that allow to access individual data point values in a Data object.
The term "data point number" is always local on a MPI process and referes to the value (data_point_in_sample, sample)
as a single identifyer (data_point_in_sample + sample * number_data_points_per_sample). a "global data point number"
referes to a tuple of a processour id and local data point number.
The function convertToNumArrayFromSampleNo has been removed now and convertToNumArrayFromDPNo renamed to getValueOfDataPoint.
There are two new functions:
getNumberOfDataPoints
setValueOfDataPoint
This allows you to do things like:
in=Data(..)
out=Data(..)
for i in xrange(in.getNumberOfDataPoints())
in_loc=in.getValueOfDataPoint(i)
out_loc=< some operations on in_loc>
out.setValueOfDataPoint(i,out_loc)
Also mindp is renamed to minGlobalDataPoint and there is a new function getValueOfGlobalDataPoint. While in MPI the functions getNumberOfDataPoints and getValueOfDataPoint are working locally on each process (so the code above is executed in parallel).
the latter allows getting a single value across all processors.

Some modifications to the binary operations +,-,*/, pow.
The code is a bit simpler now and more efficient has there is
no reseising required now. the resizing method has been removed as
it is very, very inefficient. Even serial code should be faster now.
It is now forbidden to do an inplace update of scalar data object with an object
of rank >0 as this is very slow (and does not make much sense).