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How far should a programming language aware diff go?

Language aware diffs remove noise from diffs by hiding irrelevant changes, but where do you draw the line between relevant and irrelevant changes?

In this blog post I want to discuss a question we often come across when working on SemanticDiff: What kind of changes do developers care about? This is very similar to git diff -w except that by parsing the code we can correctly determine whether a whitespace affects the interpretation of the program. On the other hand, having the option to ignore these kinds of changes can help you find modifications that were supposed to be no-ops but aren’t.

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