[robotsteve2]

Once you've got the waveforms as arrays, what do you need the ASCII rendering for?

Instead of diffing ASCII-rendered waveforms, save the arrays and diff the arrays (and then use any kind of numerical metric on the residual). Scientist programmers have all sorts of techniques for testing and debugging software that processes sampled signals.

[jwosty]

It's usually gonna be easier to tell what went wrong in an ASCII string array than a raw float[]. It's for the human reading/fixing the test.

[icapybara]

well you don't read the residual, you plot it. the ASCII plots have limited rendering resolution compared to a proper plotting system, like where you can zoom in and stuff.