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

[Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 3:36 PM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> On 08/04/2016 12:29 AM, Jacob Keller wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 3:00 PM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>> It seems odd to be that a line with "199" spaces and nothing else will
>> return "-1" but a line with 200 spaces and nothing else will return
>> 200..? Would it be safe to just return -1 in both cases (if a line is
>> all spaces or starts with more than 200 spaces just return -1)?
>>
>>> +}
>>> +
>
> Thanks for your feedback.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Michael
>

I think in this case treating it as "all whitespace" is more natural
than treating it as "200 characters with something following it"
because the only thing we've found so far is all white space.

Either way it's not really a big deal here.

Thanks,
Jake