Hacker News Reader

File versioning was in BBN's TENEX, which evolved into TOPS-20 ("TWENEX") for DEC's DECSYSTEM 20 computers.

File versioning is also part of pathnames in Common Lisp, although it (the versioning, not Common Lisp) is really a fossil at this point.

View on HN

I always wondered if Common Lisp pathname versioning could be leveraged intentionally when pointing at files in a git repo, to reference older versions of that filename. (And whether that gives any utility...)

You'd have to violate the standard a bit (version is a positive integer and :newest refers to the largest such in the file system). But I don't know that anyone uses it these days, so maybe that's ok.

Sadly too young for systems before this VAX!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com