On Sat, 27 Dec 1997, Mikael Karpberg wrote:

Well, diff --ignore-space-change would be a pretty good start (tabs, spaces, and empty lines :). Removing comments would be a pretty trivial lex program, or there are also a couple of infamous perl regexps which match C comments. To further reduce noise, both bits of code to be diffed could be run through indent first, converting them to a mutually unacceptable but consistent style. This then could all be bundled up into one program `cdiff'. :)

Well, if you used tabs and spaces in the right places, then this wouldn't be a problem. My rules, #1: never mix tabs and spaces to achieve the desired spacing, #2: never use tabs to align with text that wasn't aligned with the exact same number of tabs. These rules really reduce to: Make no stupid assumptions about the number of spaces in tabs. I edit with 3, 4, and 8 space tabs variously to ensure these rules are met. Needless to say, reading code not my own is always so depressing.