Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

[Koen G]

Let's simplify and say that some glyphs or glyph clusters only appear at word end. Think n, edy... Because for some reason these dominate the ends of words, they also make the occurrence of spaces predictable, because a space follows word end. In this case you could say that spaces are perfectly normal: they are only predictable because the "words" themselves don't provide many different contexts for spaces to appear in.

In the second scenario, blank space is inserted in a predictable way. It is the use of blank space that makes "words" appear even more predictable than they were.

The result may be exactly the same, but the underlying system and the way we may think about spaces is different.