After moving from manual editors and Appbuilders, everybody is now using PDS.
I like to press CRTL-I to get the same look & feel to every program which needs to be updated.
But then a compare (in PDS) shows sometimes millions of changes but in real the result is still the same.
Is there any chance to get rid of that? (General/Patch/Ignore spaces is activated)
Example:
Old:
IF ... then do:
New:
IF ... then
do:
Welcome to the classic problem of source code comparison! Years ago, Varnet used to comment out huge blocks of code when programs were revised just to keep the number of differences before to after to a smaller number.
The only real solution here would be to build a source code comparison tool based on Proparse so that one was comparing the syntactically resolved source.
There's no good way around code that shifts between lines; even if that code is syntactically identical. Some code comparison tools can ignore whitespace; the ones I know about only deal with differences in whitespace on single lines, not across lines.
Suggestion: For changes like this do a one time pass through the code that ONLY affects reformatting and nothing else. Perform a checkin that clearly marks that it is a formatting change only in the comments. So developers can ignore it. From that point on, make other improvements to the code and ensure they are formatted to your current standard.
Yes, a double check-in, that's the only real solution for old code if there are many changes.
I tested a few tools today and found Compare++ which has an option to handle this.
But I would like to use the internal one which is better integrated.