“Persistent” is older than I thought

“Persistent” usually refers to data that persists across multiple executions of a program. But in the last few years I've occasionally heard it used, especially in the Clojure community, for data structures that are updated nondestructively. (The old version persists after the update — get it?)

I saw this as a newfangled sloppy usage, but it ain't so. Like many seemingly new usages, it's surprisingly old. It dates back at least to 1985, when it appears prominently in Sarnak & Tarjan's Planar Point Location Using Persistent Search Trees. It was popularized a few years later by the same authors plus two others in Making Data Structures Persistent, and Tarjan has used it many times since then.

The more common sense — data that persists across program executions — is not much older. The earliest uses I've found are from several papers in 1976. Earlier ones are about either persistence of phosphors (an important issue for CRTs) or fault-tolerance by persistently retrying. It apparently caught on quickly, at least in the database community, because Jim Gray's 1977 Notes on Data Base Operating Systems takes it as standard enough to use without bothering to define it.

So it's reasonable to object to “persistent”=“nondestructive” because it conflicts with a more important concept, but not because it's new.

Maybe now someone will tell me it's in some very standard source like Knuth and I never noticed...