How can I diff two files, but ignore differences in Perl/C/C++ comments?

Question

Hi, I would like to take the diff of two source code files, but I don't want it to report any differences for lines that only contain a programming language comment. The types of comments I would like it to ignore are:

// ...
# ...
/* ... */

Answer 1

BeyondCompare has an option to ignore these comments.

Answer 2

See our Smart Differencer for tools that compare programming langauge files according to structure, not lines of text. So, whitespace (including linebreaks if they are whitespace in your language) including comments gets ignored.

These tools work by parsing the source code to determine its structure.

There are SmartDifferencers for C and C++. Not one for Perl. Perl's hard to parse :-}