Re: [PATCH 8/8] diff: improve positioning of add/delete blocks in diffs

Michael Haggerty [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

+       }
+       /*
+        * We have reached the end of the line without finding any non-space
+        * characters; i.e., the whole line consists of trailing spaces, which we
+        * are not interested in.
+        */
+       return -1;

Not related to Jacob's review, but "the whole line consists of
trailing spaces" made me read it twice; while it is technically
correct, "the whole line consists of spaces", or even "this is a
blank line", would read a lot more easily, at least for me.

I was implicitly assuming that such lines would have text somewhere
after those 200 spaces (or 25 TABs or whatever). But you're right, the
line could consist only of whitespace. Unfortunately, the only way to
distinguish these two cases is to read the rest of the line, which is
exactly what we *don't* want to do.

Hmm, why is it exactly what we don't want to do?  Is it a
performance concern?  In other words, is it because this function is
called many times to measure the same line multiple times?  After
all, somebody in this file is already scanning each and every line
to see where it ends to split the input into records, so perhaps a
"right" (if the "theoretical correctness" of the return value from
this function mattered, which you wave-away below) optimization
could be to precompute it while the lines are broken into records
and store it in the "rec" structure?

But I think it doesn't matter anyway. Such "text" will likely never be
read by a human, so it's not a big deal if the slider position is not
picked perfectly. And remember, this whole saga is just to improve the
aesthetics of the diff. The diff is *correct* (e.g., in the sense of
applicable) regardless of where we position the sliders.

A better argument may be "if the user is truly reading a diff output
for such an unusual "text", it is likely that she has a very wide
display and/or running less -S, and treating such an overindented line
as if it were a blank line would give a result that is more consistent
to what appears on her display", perhaps?