> But! The underlying storage uses deltas (which are diffs) to save space. That's the material cause. This does not make the "commits are stored as diffs" stor

> But! The underlying storage uses deltas (which are diffs) to save space. That's the material cause. This does not make the "commits are stored as diffs" story much more true: 1. This is only true of pack files, but pack files are only created once the repository exceeds a certain size. 2. Nothing about the pack file format requires that deltas follow the chronology of commits at all. The deltas could be stored in reverse order or even random order compared to the chain of commits. 3. The deltas in a pack file do not correspond to a change in a given commit, they are just the data to create a particular snapshot. If you find that a commit's file blob is stored in a pack file as a delta, that does not tell you anything about whether the file changed in that particular commit. You have to look at two commits and diff them to determine which files actually changed. If a person wants to think about version control in an abstract way, then yes the two views (commits vs diffs) are somewhat interchangeable. If a person wants to understand what actually happens when you run a Git command, the answer to that question is less open to interpretation.