More powerful than objects() or ls()

There are times when the date is very valuable information,
particularly years later.  I would like to be able to do something
similar in R but of course, the same method won't work because objects
are not stored as separate unix files in a .Data directory.

I had thought of adding a date with attr() and was then going to redo
the function which could use that information in place of the file
information I used in Splus.  Unfortunately, that means the date
attibute is added to everything when displayed which is too cluttered.

Then of course, I'd need to figure an easy (preferably automatic) way
of adding the date to the objects I was interested in.  However, I was
hoping someone might already have a better way of achieving the same
end, and preferably without the unnecessary verbiage mentioned above.