[Chris_Newton]

I’m assuming it was a reference to merging in source control. A lot of “noise” in diffs, and by extension in merges and the sometimes awkward job of resolving merge conflicts, comes from little details like whitespace and punctuation rather than substantial semantic changes in the code. Many a coding standard, and even a language change from time to time, has been made with this in mind, sometimes to the point of putting punctuation in odd places or avoiding aligning items using extra whitespace just to minimise the number and/or size of diffs to check.