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Semantically meaningful S-expression diff

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Semantically meaningful S-expression diff
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Tree-diff for lisp source code
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637
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Et al.
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CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Abstract
Lisp has a wonderful minimal syntax that almost directly expresses the abstract syntax tree. Yet, diff and other tooling operate on the unix newline ending model. When lisp prides itself for its minimal syntax---code is data---that is easy to parse, why can't we do better? Traditional diff implementations, such as GNU Diff, treat files as a flat list of lines. A tree-diff algorithm that can produce minimal and semantically meaningful output is a surprisingly more difficult and complex problem. In fact, for unordered trees, the problem is NP-hard. In this talk, I will demonstrate a very early working prototype of an S-expression diff program. The program can operate on two versions of some lisp source code and extract a meaningful tree-diff. The program aims to replace 'git diff' and related tools for lisp projects.