Ldiff: An enhanced line differencing tool

Authors:
Gerardo Canfora;Luigi Cerulo;Massimiliano Di Penta
Affiliations:
RCOST - Dept. of Engineering, University of Sannio, Via Traiano, 82100 Benevento, Italy;RCOST - Dept. of Engineering, University of Sannio, Via Traiano, 82100 Benevento, Italy;RCOST - Dept. of Engineering, University of Sannio, Via Traiano, 82100 Benevento, Italy
Venue:
ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
Year:
2009

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Abstract

Differencing tools are highly relevant for a series of software engineering tasks, including analyzing developers' activities, assessing the changeability of software artifacts, and monitoring the maintenance of critical assets such as source clones and vulnerable instructions. This tool demonstration shows the features of ldiff, an enhanced, language-independent line differencing tool. L-diff builds upon the Unix diff and overcomes its limitations in determining whether an artifact line has been changed or is the result of additions and removals, and in tracking artifact fragments that have been moved upward or downward within the file. The paper describes the tool and shows its capability of analyzing changes on different kinds of software artifacts, including use cases, code developed with different programming languages, and test cases.