SDiff: A Comparison Tool based in Syntactical Document Structure

Version control systems tend to compare textual information from documents in which the indivisible element is the line or word. However, the versioned content is usually highly structured (for example, programming languages) and using a text based mechanism can disrespect syntactical limits and other properties of the document, making it difficult to interpret what has really changed. In this work we describe a tool that compares documents using their syntactic structure, identifying more precisely the relevant difference to the reader, as well as reducing the effort to understand the semantics of the changes.