I recently wrote an R package that computes the differences between arbitrary R objects as closures precisely for the reason the authors gave in their abstract:

I recently wrote an R package that computes the differences between arbitrary R objects as closures precisely for the reason the authors gave in their abstract: it is much more computationally feasible to remember changes in program outputs than to perform full recomputation. In their lingo, this means I defined a change structure for R objects. https://github.com/robertzk/objectdiff https://github.com/robertzk/objectdiff