Package numdiff-5.2.1-1

numdiff is a little program that can be used to compare putatively similar files line by line and field by field, ignoring small numeric differences or/and different numeric formats. Equivalently, Numdiff is a program with the capability to appropriately compare files containing numerical fields (and not only). By default, Numdiff assumes the fields are separated by white-space characters (spaces, horizontal tabulations and newlines), but the user can also specify its list of separators through the option -s, see the User Manual. When you compare a couple of such files, what you want to obtain usually is a list of the numerical fields in the second file which numerically differ from the corresponding fields in the first file. Well known tools like diff, cmp or wdiff can not be used to this purpose: they can not recognize whether a difference between two numerical fields is only due to the notation or is actually a difference of numerical values. Moreover, you could also want to ignore differences in numerical values as long as they do not exceed a certain threshold. In other words, you could desire to neglect all small numerical differences too. However, programs like diff and wdiff can not be used to ignore small numerical differences, since they do not even know what a numerical difference is. That is why I decided to implement Numdiff. In writing this program I was inspired by ndiff, a GPL'ed software by Nelson H. F. Beebe of the Salt Lake City University, see http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/software/ndiff ndiff is a good tool and I used it for a while, but I did not completely like the way it works and so numdiff was born. Although ndiff inspired numdiff, they are completely different from the viewpoint of the source code: numdiff has been entirely written from scratch with addition of source code from GNU bc, GNU diff and GNUlib.