[metapost] verbatimtex... etex after mpost 1.210

[Nicola]

Hi,
in a thread more or less one month old, Taco, commenting on the change 
introduced with mpost 1.210 about leaving the content of verbatimtex... 
etex intact, and its consequences on code like

verbatimtex  <-- This whitespace won't be removed
%&latex      <-- This will end up on the second line of the file
etex

has written:

> From this example, it obvious that any whitespace starting before the
> TeX code in the first verbatimtex really does need to be stripped,
> because tex's --parse-first-line is not willing to look at the second
> line ;) This should not be a hard thing to fix (but the TeX interface
> is always tricky).

After thinking about it, I would suggest instead that the whitespace *on 
the same line* of *every* occurrence of verbatimtex be removed, up to 
the first new-line (included) or to the first non-space character (not 
included). This should be easier to implement (no need to keep track of 
the first verbatimtex) and it treats every verbatimtex-etex block in a 
consistent way. What do you think? Can we expect to see this fix in the 
next release?

Nicola