According to Ilya Zakharevich:
Suppose you edit contents. How to make sure that the metadata of all
the users is updated?
Something I just remembered: Xanadu's system doesn't actually allow
editing _per_se_. Rather, once you've created something it lives
forever (conceptually, anyway). What humans see as "editing", Xanadu
sees as creating new 'documents' by reusing bits of existing content
together with bits of newly created content (if any).
So a hyperlink to old data still applies to a new document that
contains the old data, because in a very real sense the new document
_does_contain_ the old data -- the real old data, not a copy of it.
Whether this system can possibly apply in its full glory to Perl's
internals is a separate question, of course.
--
Chip Salzenberg - a.k.a. -
<chip(_at_)perlsupport(_dot_)com>
"... under cover of afternoon in the biggest car in the county?!" //MST3K
