Abstract

A brief survey of the theory and practice of sequence comparison is made focusing on diff, the UNIX 1 file difference utility. 1 Sequence comparison Sequence comparison is a deep and fascinating subject in Computer Science, both theoretical and practical. However, in our opinion, neither the theoretical nor the practical aspects of the problem are well understood and we feel that their mastery is a true challenge for Computer Science. The central problem can be stated very easily: find an algorithm, as efficient and practical as possible, to compute a longest common subsequence (lcs for short) of two given sequences 2 . As usual, a subsequence of a sequence is another sequence obtained from it by deleting some (not necessarily contiguous) terms. Thus, both en/pri and en/pai are longest common subsequences of sequence/comparison and theory/and/practice. Part of this work was done while the author was visiting the Universit'e de Rouen, in 1987. That visit was partially supported...

Citations

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