Comparison operators are whitespace-sensitive

I was messing around in Jekyll with Liquid and discovered this weird behaviour when I hit auto-format on an HTML file:

{% assign foo = "bar" %}
{% if foo == "bar" %}
  true
{% else %}
  false
{% endif %}

gives the result true, whereas

{% assign foo = "bar" %}
{% if foo=="bar" %}
  true
{% else %}
  false
{% endif %}

gives the result false.

Furthermore,

{% assign foo = "" %}
{% if foo=="bar" %}
  true
{% else %}
  false
{% endif %}

gives the result true, as though Liquid is evaluating against the empty string.

Can anyone replicate this? Is this documented (and I missed it)? I can't seem to find any notes on how whitespace is relevant to Liquid, and I would expect it to obey the same whitespace rules as HTML (ie. ignore all unnecessary whitespace).
#428 relevant?

Reproduce the two Liquid snippets to confirm how whitespace changes comparison results, then trace the comparison parsing path in the Liquid implementation. Done means comparisons behave consistently regardless of optional surrounding whitespace, with regression coverage for the shown cases.