Blank string values.

[John Darrington]

From what I remember playing with SPSS (I no longer have a system to use)
I remember two things:
String values cannot be empty, every alpha value contains the number of
bytes corresponding to its width.  However a string variable which contains
only whitespace is treated as if it were empty.

This raises the question: Should we special case the value_hash function, such 
that it returns the same hash for blank values regardless of their width?
Likewise, value comparisions should perhaps treat fully blank values as 
identical.

Introducing these kind of special cases seems rather kludgy to me. But is 
perhaps
necessary for compatibility reasons.

What do people think?

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