From: David Barr (barr@visi.com)
Date: Mon Apr 28 2003 - 13:19:42 CDT
> Precisely. Like it or not, trailing whitespace is *not*
> reliably preserved in Usenet transmission and storage, and
> it's best not to depend on it, either for continuation
> parsing or for the obligatory SP. The son-of-1036 rules in
> this area were designed to guarantee that trailing whitespace
> was never significant in headers.
If I recall, the only transport software that stripped trailing whitespace
was PSU NETNEWS (for IBM VM/CMS). During my days at PSU I became quite
familiar with its, um, characteristics. The stripping was a result of the
way the files were stored - the system simply was not able to let you put
whitespace on the end of a line, and truncated it. With the long demise of
BITNET and the related downfall of all things VM/CMS in the academic world,
I would be extremely surprised to any PSU NETNEWS sites still in existence.
I'd have to confirm with Linda Littleton, but I would guess that PSU NETNEWS
hasn't been touched well before PSUVM was powered down at the end of 1999
(my guess is at most 1996).
--Dave