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notgood on March 29, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Making a good diff algorithm

This "problem" may be more of a conceptual one rather than a technical one; for example, a file with "years = [1989,1870,2016]" diffed with "years = [1920,1889,1670]" according to you should appear as the move of 6 lines, it is technically true but doesn't help the user one bit, which is usually the purpose of a diff.

jfoutz on March 29, 2017 [–]

[a,b,... indicates individual lines in the file. Shuffling fragments of array elements seems silly, of course.

Swapping the order of two functions seems like an important thing for diff to do.

notgood on March 29, 2017 | [–]

Oh, yeah fair enough, I misunderstood at first.

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