I was thinking in terms of say do a diff between previous versions of the files stored in svn, p4, git, etc. - and then keep in mind that these might be diffed/

I was thinking in terms of say do a diff between previous versions of the files stored in svn, p4, git, etc. - and then keep in mind that these might be diffed/merged/viewed/reviewed in tons of different ways - from automatic tools checking certain coding rules, or expanding $fields$ (perforce/rcs), or reviewing online (ReviewBoard), or who knows what. so far TEXT files (ASCII, utf-8, utf-16, etc.) have made most sense for source code, when comes to huge group of people (100+).