Re: Please any one suggest me some project ideas

From: MSCHAEF.COM (mschaef_at_fnord.io.com)
Date: 02/03/04 

Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004 10:23:59 -0600

In article <f5dda427.0401301813.162a6f08@posting.google.com>,
Edward G. Nilges <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote:
   ...
>(2) Write a program that will compare two or more source files
>PROPERLY. Windiff, the Windows program that highlights differences in
>a GUI is a joke,

I wholeheartedly disagree. Windiff is one of the most useful development
tools that I regularly.

>since it manages to preserve the illusion that a
>program is a series of punched cards.

Which is largely a correct "illusion" unless you're continually
reformatting your program.

>The program's output should be a minimal set of sensible instructions
>for converting one file to another phrased in terms of syntax.
>Therefore it should create the parse trees for the compared programs
>and emit the changes by a tree comparision.

Georgia Tech did something like this to detect cheaters in
programming assignments. It's called cheatfinder, and works by
doing a more intelligent compare of two programs' structure. It
flags programs that match more than a pre-determined level.

It's not quite a diff, but it's the same general idea.

> For example, it might say
>"change the damn identifier in the third statement of the procedure
>named FooBar from a to b".

If I had a diff program that produced output like that, it'd be borderline
useless. Windiff (and command line diff) are so useful primarily because
they (show the code) that's changed, rather than producing an
elaborate description of the change. I'd rather interpret the results of a
diff output record myself.

-Mike 

-- 
http://www.mschaef.com

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