Maybe most correct is to say diff and seq alignments are specializations of some superset, given the specializations for both situations. Diff algorithms absol

Maybe most correct is to say diff and seq alignments are specializations of some superset, given the specializations for both situations. Diff algorithms absolutely do assign a "score" to edits, just in a very simple way. For example, by playing with the Myers diff algorithm, you can get an edit distance of one where you simply rewrite the entire file, or a large edit distance but with the smallest edits possible.