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[Tim Harig]

On 2010-11-05, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 2010-11-05, Tim Harig <usernet at ilthio.net> wrote:
>> On 2010-11-05, Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:47:59 +0000, Tim Harig wrote:
>>>
>>>> I have seen huge patches caused by nothing more then some edit that
>>>> accidently added a trailing space to a large number of lines.  White
>>>> space mangling happens all the time without people even knowing about
>>>> it.
>
> And how does that affect a Python program?  The same as it does a C
> program.

I wasn't making any statement of C versus Python in this thread.  Those
have been covered elsewhere.  I was responding to your assertion:

	It exists because so many people change whitespace intentionally
	in C source code because no two C programmers seem able to agree
	on how to format code.	Diff -b allows you to attempt to ignore
	semantically null stylistic changes made by programmers.

That is clearly wrong.  If a C programmer changes the format of the code,
it is almost universally true that they will make changes that affect more
then just the whitespace on a single line.  Diff will register these
changes even with the -b option.  I provided a couple of common scenerios
that are more likely to have justified the -b option.