text is easily version able and comparable means a lot to me.
Don't you really want to do more meaningful comparisons though? I think text is a poor form for versioning and comparison because you always have to mentally extrapolate the textual diff (lines added/deleted) to the syntactic diff (functions added/deleted/modified) to the diff in effect (which logic in which systems is modified). There is no reason other forms of programs cannot also do diffs, that could be more useful.
Visual does't have to mean flowchart boxes. Even a tree structure might be incrementally better than plain text.
Syntax-aware diff for text isn't hard, but it's just not usually worth the effort because line-oriented text diff is good enough and more generally applicable.
Comments
Don't you really want to do more meaningful comparisons though? I think text is a poor form for versioning and comparison because you always have to mentally extrapolate the textual diff (lines added/deleted) to the syntactic diff (functions added/deleted/modified) to the diff in effect (which logic in which systems is modified). There is no reason other forms of programs cannot also do diffs, that could be more useful.
Visual does't have to mean flowchart boxes. Even a tree structure might be incrementally better than plain text.
Syntax-aware diff for text isn't hard, but it's just not usually worth the effort because line-oriented text diff is good enough and more generally applicable.