Itanium® Architecture for Programmers: Understanding 64-Bit Processors and EPIC Principles

3.3. Comparing Variants of a Source File

As we have repeatedly implied, assembly language is not very friendly, in the sense that the programmer must attend to many small details that compilers for high-level languages perform behind the scenes. For most of us, spotting tiny differences among already small details is rather difficult for our eye-brain coordination.

Many programming environments provide some sort of standard utility program to compare two virtually identical text files and find the differences. The utility program reads both versions and shows those lines where differences occur and the contexts in which whole lines may have been inserted or deleted. The simplest comparison command is the same for the Linux and HP-UX programming ...