McIlroy's work was preceded and influenced by Steve Johnson's comparison program on GECOS and Mike Lesk's proof program.
The potential usefulness of a diff tool provoked McIlroy into researching and designing a more robust tool that could be used in a variety of tasks but perform well in the processing and space limitations of the PDP-11's hardware.
McIlroy considered writing a post-processor for diff where a variety of output formats could be designed and implemented, but he found it more frugal and simpler to have diff be responsible for generating the syntax and reverse-order input accepted by the ed command.
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