Sorry guys, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but when I designed the code, I intentionally put it in the Tools/scripts section rather than as a command-line option for a library module.  As the author of the context_diff and unified_diff, I was concerned that wasn't competitive with a real diff tool in a numbers of ways.  IIRC, Guido had problems with it and couldn't get it to work with "patch" and Uncle Timmy noted some algorithmic difference with other diffs.

I'm going to close this because I think it is not a good idea to offer an "attractive nuisance".

Victor, I attended David's talk and enjoyed it thoroughly.  However, if you thought he was arguing for the standard library to be turned into a suite of command-line unix replacements, you may have missed the point.  In addition, most of his "magic" was done by writing scripts that incorporated the tools (for example, the diffs were part of a script that reconstructed the change history for a series of files).