Source code comparison tools

"John R Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
19 Jan 2005 22:50:04 -0500

          From comp.compilers

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Source code comparison tools johnl@iecc.com (John R Levine) (2005-01-19)
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Re: Source code comparison tools idbaxter@semdesigns.com (Ira Baxter) (2005-01-22)
Re: Source code comparison tools debray@CS.Arizona.EDU (2005-01-22)
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From: "John R Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 19 Jan 2005 22:50:04 -0500
Organization: Compilers Central
Keywords: tools, question
Posted-Date: 19 Jan 2005 22:50:04 EST

I'm working on a project where I'm trying to understand how a program
evolved. I have a bunch of snapshots of the C source code to work from.


It's easy enough to use the Unix diff program to compare the snapshots,
but it's much too low level. If someone changes the name of variable A to
B, diff sees that as a change every time the variable is referenced, but
it's really only one change.


I can hack up some preprocessing scripts to abstract out variable names,
indentation, and the like before handing the files to diff, but before I
do so, I'd like to see if there's existing tools I can use.


Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Mayor
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.



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