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by benatkin 534 days ago
It would be like a syntax highlighter. It’s doable.
1 comments
slooonz 534 days ago
But diff does not exists in a vacuum. It would need to be integrated to IDEs, editor, merge tools, PR tools. You now have to have `patch` understand and depend on the details of the syntax of your language. In a way that may break between different versions of diff and patch. Not even starting with variants of a language, different interpretations of how to handle the preprocessor/macros system, different editions of the same language.

All that, just to not have to add a trailing comma ?

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benatkin 534 days ago
Most things like patch would still use line diff. I think I would want this semantic diff in the merge request review and the logs. It could have definitions distributed with the syntax highlighters in language plugins in an editor/IDE, git CLI, and git forge.
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from-nibly 534 days ago
So GitHub, git lab, gutbucket, gittea (and its 50 forks), fossil, and all the other tools should change, not the formatting of the code?
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benatkin 534 days ago
No, having a concise separator is still preferable to saving a line in a diff.
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