Semantic Diff Utilities

Posted by rubancache on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by rubancache
Published on 2009-02-07T06:37:08Z Indexed on 2010/04/24 9:03 UTC
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I'm trying to find some good examples of semantic diff/merge utilities. The traditional paradigm of comparing source code files works by comparing lines and characters.. but are there any utilities out there (for any language) that actually consider the structure of code when comparing files?

For example, existing diff programs will report "difference found at character 2 of line 125. File x contains v-o-i-d, where file y contains b-o-o-l". A specialized tool should be able to report "Return type of method doSomething() changed from void to bool".

I would argue that this type of semantic information is actually what the user is looking for when comparing code, and should be the goal of next-generation progamming tools. Are there any examples of this in available tools?

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