Re: Various mail/news and editor bugs

[Bob Page]

Joe Francis wrote, re whitespace work landing in 0.9:

> Sorry it's taking so long; it's not easy.

Just curious -- why is it not easy?  I understand TAB characters -- they
are evil things with indeterminate representation that should just be
converted to space characters by the composer IMHO - but that problem
unfortunately will never go away.

However, considering a SPC character (ascii 0x20) for instance, which has
a specific representation for any particular character set, why is it more
difficult to handle than, say, a capital M character?  Why don't we have
lots of issues with "M" handling?

This isn't a troll, I'm just curious about the design rationale of the code.

bp