How is diff less effective? I see the diff in the formatting I prefer? With sed, I can project the source into a formatting most convenient for what I’m trying to do with sed. And I have no idea what you’re on about version control. It ruins sending patch files that require a line number around, but most places don’t do that any more.

What I would be curious on is tracing from errors back to the source code. Nearly every language I’ve used prints line number and offset on the line for the error. How that worked in the Diana world would be interesting to learn.

You'd have to run diff and sed before the formatter which is harder for everyone.