Is tab whitespace?

I was surprised to find that the tab character seems not to be treated
as whitespace by psql (7.1). Is this a bug or a feature? Specifically,
the following command fails if there is a tab (\t) between "bar" and "init":t:"

ezmlm=> create table foo (bar int);
ERROR: parser: parse error at or near ";"

It succeeds if there is a space instead of a tab:

ezmlm=> create table foo (bar int);
CREATE

Ellen Spertus