Is "diff" program supposed to have a switch at command line to disable following (ignore) symbolic links when -r switch is given, like many other programs do?

In many places, a directory or source file can be symbolically linked multiple times to different archives. Since the original source will be diffed anyway, why "diff" needs to
follow symlinks to compare a same source multiple times?

In the other case, if partition A has a symlink to somewhere in partition B, which has
a symlink back to partition A , then "diff -r" will loop forever.

I think that "diff" need a switch to disable following symlink to compare final object, instead, just check if symlink exists in both checked directories, like ls -P.

   -Jin
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