strange behavior of aliases whose value end with space

[Thomas Lotterer]

Dear bug hunters,
I came across a strange behavior of bash(1) when the value of an alias
ends up with a space character. I'm not sure if this is actually a
bug, but if it isn't maybe someone can enlighten me and explain what's
going on in the example below. It was my expectation to see "foo" being
printed in both cases. This issue is probably the same or related to the
unanswered report by Ilya Beylin a long time ago in december 2001 [1].
The issue is not related to a specific OS or CPU architecture.

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 2.05b.7(1)-release (i386-unknown-freebsd4.10) [OpenPKG-2.1]
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

$ alias foo=one      

$ alias bar="echo"
$ bar foo
foo

$ alias bar="echo "
$ bar foo
one

[1] 
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=200112201054.LAA04281%40rhea.sthlm.prover.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26q%3Dalias%26btnG%3DSearch%26meta%3Dgroup%253Dgnu.bash.bug

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