I know that for discovering that a single LINE has been displaced elsewhere, first, such a tool would need a much more complicated algorithm, since without being really sophisticated, it would process lots of false 'hits': It goes without saying that in normal texts, here and there, but in programming, LOTS of lines would be identical, but without being displaced, it's just that the same lines occur, again and again, within many, DIFFERENT, contexts. 'All' these tools just compare line by line, and the respective line content, and are thus unable to 'see' that a bunch of 10 or 50 lines is UNCHANGED, whenever that bunch of lines has been displaced elsewhere in the second text.įor every programmer who displaces routines within his global set of programming lines, this makes these ordinary tools almost unusable, and existing tools which lack such functionality, unfortunately are NOT amended in such a way (and the developers of BC (of which I have a license) are very friendly but don't do the necessary development to their otherwise fine program either), but there should be SOME tools at least that DO such a thing. Now, the review being from 2005, this prob has been resolved long ago.īut there is another prob with almost all of these text compare tools, which is they are unable to compare 'displaced text parts', or whatever you would call them. It states, there is one prob with BC, which is lack of in-place editing. Here on DC, there is an old 'comparitive' review of Beyond Compare:

Winmerge export differences to file