Spaces do not exist during compilation?

[tueda]

If I understand correctly, LoadStatement removes all spaces (' ' and '\t'), except those inside strings. For example, form -y converts

S  x  ,  y  [  x  y  ]   , , "[  x  y  ]";
.end

into

S,x,y,[,x,y,],,"[  x  y  ]"

This means compiler routines like Co* don't need to care about spaces.

But there are many snippets in them like:

SKIPBLANKS(s)

SKIPBLANKS(s);

while ( *s == ' ' || *s == '\t' ) s++;

and

while ( *s == ',' || *s == '\t' || *s == ' ' ) s++;

while ( *s == ',' || *s == ' ' || *s == '\t' ) s++;

while ( *s && ( *s == ',' || *s == ' ' || *s == '\t' ) ) s++;

For the last 3 variants, I also added a helper SkipSpaces(&s);.

Do we really need all these space-skipping checks? They look redundant and inefficient, and can be replaced with, say, SkipCommas(&s);. Or am I missing something?