Re: @item and @tab space in lists and tables

[Karl Berry]

    As a side note spaces are ignored after alphanumerical accent @-command
    like @ringaccent and following letter is considered to be the argument
    which goes in the direction of stripping spaces after all the
    @-commands.

Yes, as far as TeX goes, it's all about an alphabetic command name (not
alphanumeric BTW :) vs. a non-alphabetic one (which is always a single
character).  And this is essentially impossible to change.

Within @example-like environments, we make spaces active in TeX, so they
get preserved in general.  It seems to me that using @item or whatever
in such contexts is going to produce pretty suboptimal output, but if it
works for the Lilyponders, fine.  Anyway, as far as the language goes,
we can say spaces are preserved in such places.

Thanks,
k