diff operations directly over lists, and support for diff and patch application

[eschulte]

Hi,

Thanks for releasing this package, I'm finding it very useful. The three commits in this pull request (1) expose functions for applying diffs to sequences instead of only against files, (2) add functions for applying diffs to sequences to yield modified sequences (I didn't add support for :insert or :replace chunk kinds because I didn't see them in my test diffs), and (3) for applying full patches.

With these changes this library nicely complements a simple delta-debugging tool I've put together (see https://github.com/eschulte/delta-debug), and should be useful in other projects I'm working on at the moment. I'll be very pleased if you apply these changes. If there is anything I can do to make these commits more palatable (e.g., splitting up the commits into seperate pull requests, functional or aesthetic changes, etc..) just let me know.

Cheers, Eric

[froydnj]

Thanks for this! This looks useful. Apologies to not getting back to you in a very timely fashion.

It's been a long time since I looked at this code, so if you have things working with it, I'm just going to trust the the code is correct. I do have one question, though: you state in your pull request that you don't have support for :insert or :replace chunk kinds, but it looks like your last commit adds support for them? Is that correct and the comment in the pull request was just an oversight? Or something else?

[eschulte]

I added support for :insert and :replace after I submitted the initial pull request (apparently github will update pull requests to reflect subsequent commits).

I've been using the new code in these commits and haven't run into any problems thus far so I think they should be safe to apply. I'll be working with this package fairly steadily in the near term so if any bugs do arise from these changes I'll be available to fix them.

[froydnj]

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation and the code!