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

> 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
>