This is a great concern, and glad you brought it up.
In ETNs (the new family of programming languages I'm talking about), there are no "whitespace changes", in the sense that all changes to the code affect actual nodes in the program.
This is a really important property that embeds diffs with a whole lot more meaning. You can not only see the number of lines changed, but also the number of nodes changed. If you expected a change to only change content and not change any nodes, and you saw in a negative number in the nodes changed field, you would know immediately that something had gone wrong.
This is one of the many new beneficial properties unique to these languages.
No, that's not changing the behavior of the existing tools everyone uses and aren't going to stop using. You can't say correct when you're not actually agreeing with his point.
It changes the behavior in the sense that there is no w=1 option. All whitespace is significant. The idea of ignoring whitespace would be like the idea of ignoring angle brackets in html. Whitespace is an essential part of TN and ETNs and is never ignored.
Diff tools then can benefit by showing not only aggregate line diffs but aggregate node and word level diffs without knowing anything about the meaning of a program.
In ETNs (the new family of programming languages I'm talking about), there are no "whitespace changes", in the sense that all changes to the code affect actual nodes in the program.
This is a really important property that embeds diffs with a whole lot more meaning. You can not only see the number of lines changed, but also the number of nodes changed. If you expected a change to only change content and not change any nodes, and you saw in a negative number in the nodes changed field, you would know immediately that something had gone wrong.
This is one of the many new beneficial properties unique to these languages.