my "keep" script

[Skaperen]

in a technical sense, it could be said it didn't know about such tools.  that's because i have been doing it this way since before those tools even existed.  i didn't call it "keep" back then.  it went through a number of names.  i think the first one was called "TRACKER" and it was written in the EXEC2 language on VM/CMS circa 1978.  it had a feature to export updates to the OS/VS2 batch system (and stored in a big PDS until they woul go to tape).  i did that because i could write to tape more easily that way.  i rewrote it into REXX in 1980 or so.  i was thinking of writing a version in assembler soon after that but it never happened.  i started writing one in PCL in 1984, got it to the point of working, but never really finished the error handling.  that one made use of tools i had created to transmit files with ASCII to EBCDIC conversion from TOPS-20 to OS/MVS and VM/CMS.  one of those tools was actually written in COBOL because i just want to prove to someone that i could make even COBOL do system stuff.  today, i would use Python everywhere it was available, even for system stuff.  i crossed paths with a few revision control programs when i got going on Unix an Linux (NeXT, Sun, Vax and more) and hated them all until Subversion which i actually found to be usable.  a friend hooked me up with Mercurial which soon got me exposed to Python.

my experiences, of course, influence my preferences.  but this is definitely not from lack of experience.  and "keep" is just a component of newer ideas.  in the beginning, source was IBM 360/370 assembler in fixed format 80 byte card image files. today, well... keep even support Perl.