Heckel, Paul:
A technique for isolating differences
between files;
Communications of the ACM, 21:4,
p.264-268;
1978
Library Entries:
ACM Digital Library
Deskriptoren: CVSM
Abstract: A simple algorithm is described for isolating the
differences between two files. One application is the comparing
of two versions of a source program or other file in order to
display all differences. The algorithm isolates differences in a
way that corresponds closely to our intuitive notion of
difference, is easy to implement, and is computationally
efficient, with time linear in the file length. For most
applications the algorithm isolates differences similar to those
isolated by the longest common subsequence. Another application
of this algorithm merges files containing independently
generated changes into a single file. The algorithm can also be
used to generate efficient encodings of a file in the form of
the differences between itself and a given datum file,
permitting reconstruction of the original file from the
diference and datum files.