I said in an earlier message ... | I have gone back and looked at the NetBSD sh, and I still see nothing | which actuially implements the "no quoted space" rule,
I understand what was happening now, there never was anything to make that happen, it was pure fluke, and the effects of a bug that caused next word alias expansion to happen (or not) incorrectly in various other places (you really don't want to know how it seemed to work almost perfectly, and yet was so far away from being correct!) In my fixed code (not yet checked into the NetBSD tree) there is an explicit check for "quoted" (which I could keep in, to keep the current behaviour, or omit to get the "any space at the end of an alias does alias lookup on next word" behaviour, changint it is (now) trivial, either way. None of this has anything to do with any current discussions (it is not intended to influence anything, either way.) kre ps: (and this bit might be relevant to the discussions) - it js really hard to imagine a use for an alias with a definition that ends "\ " (the only way to get a quoted space as the final char in what is to be the specified cases) so in practice I don't think it matters at all what decision is made about that one.
