The former could be interpreted as "a single blank", which could then map very easily onto "a single space" (since no other form of whitespace produces a single column's worth of change), but there is no such thing as "a single whitespace" in intuitive interpretation; "whitespace" is a collective noun.
I think we have different views on how we see this, blank to me means a collection of things that are not visible on the monitor. While whitespace simply means something (a single char!) that is not visble. (May I also say, you have one of the stranger forms of quoting I've ever encountered.) It is also one of the oldest forms of quoting, dating back to the birth of email, and messging across machines. :-) Not many people use this form, but it is what is used in the default GNU Emacs mail reader, rmail; which I happen to use (and like very much, it handles huge volumes of mail really well). _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
